"[re: Karla] And the next morning he got back on his plane, handed the pack of cigarettes back to me untouched--and this was a chain smoker, mind--and flew off to what he presumed would be his death... He kept my lighter. It was a gift, "From George to Anne. All my love"."

"Ha! That's it, Percy, you keep stalling! I tell you, Ben, we've got some really lousy people in this outfit, I wouldn't trust a fucking one of them!"

"Michael Mantell - Ted Pullman"

"I met him once. Karla. In fifty-five. Moscow Centre was in pieces. Purge after purge. Half their agents were jumping ship and I traveled around signing them up. Hundreds of them. One of them was calling himself Gerstmann. He was on his way back to Russia, and we were pretty sure he was going to be executed. Plane had a twenty-four hour layover at Delhi, and that's how long I had to convince him to come over to us instead of going home to die. Little room. I'm sitting here... he's sitting there. The Americans had had him tortured. No fingernails. It's incredibly hot. I'm very tired and all I want to do is get this over with and get back home. Things weren't going well with Ann. I give him the usual pitch: come to the West and we can give you a comfortable life, after questioning. Or you can catch your plane and fly home and be shot. "Think of your wife. You have a wife, don't you? I brought you some cigarettes, by the way. Use my lighter. We could arrange for her to join you, we have a lot of stock to trade. If you go back, she'll be ostracized. Think of her. Think about how much she..." Kept harping on about the damn wife. Telling him more about me than... Should have walked out, of course, but for some reason it seemed important to save this one. So I go on. "We are not so very different, you and I. We've both spent our lives looking for the weaknesses in one another's systems. Don't you think it's time to recognize there is as little worth on your side as there is on mine?" ...Never said a word. Not one word."

"[a teenage couple are making out in front of Connie and Smiley] I don't know about you George, but I'm feeling seriously under-fucked!"

"[on Karla] He's a fanatic. And the fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt."

"Jeffrey Wright - Franklin Thompson"

"Max Minghella - Ben Harpen"

"Marisa Tomei - Ida Horowicz"

"Jennifer Ehle - Cindy Morris"

"Paul Giamatti - Tom Duffy"

"Gregory Itzin - Jack Stearns"

"I had to pick a side, George. And the West has become so very ugly..."

"Evan Rachel Wood - Molly Stearns"

"[to Stephen Meyers] I really want to fuck you. That's kind of a slutty thing for me to say, huh?"

"All the reporters love you. Even the reporters that hate you still love you."

"You can lie, you can cheat, you can start a war, you can bankrupt the country, but you can't fuck the interns. They get you for that."

"Ryan Gosling - Stephen Meyers"

"George Clooney - Mike Morris"

"I'm not a Christian. I'm not an atheist. I'm not Jewish. I'm not Muslim. My religion, what I believe in is called the Constitution of United States of America."

"Philip Seymour Hoffman - Paul Zara"

"[on the phone] As I said, you may fuck me but you still have to call me "Sir" in the morning."

"[to Smiley] Karla said you were very good, the one we had to worry about. But you do have a blind spot. And if I was known to be Ann's lover, you wouldn't be able to see me straight. And he was right, up to a point."

"Trust no one. Suspect everyone."

"How do you find an enemy who is hidden right before your eyes?"

"Al Sapienza – Louis Carmelo"

"Susan Blackwell – Lauren Bratberg"

"Mary McDonnell – Mary Rogers"

"Stanley Tucci – Eric Dale"

"Aasif Mandvi – Ramesh Shah"

"Demi Moore – Sarah Robertson"

"Ashley Williams – Heather Burke"

"Simon Baker – Jared Cohen"

"Do you know I built a bridge once? ... I was an engineer by trade... It went from Dilles Bottom, Ohio to Moundsville, West Virginia. It spanned nine hundred and twelve feet above the Ohio River. Twelve thousand people used this thing a day. And it cut out thirty-five miles of driving each way between Wheeling and New Martinsville. That's a combined 847,000 miles of driving a day. Or 25,410,000 miles a month. And 304,920,000 miles a year. Saved. Now I completed that project in 1986, that's twenty-two years ago. So over the life of that one bridge, that's 6,708,240,000 miles that haven't had to be driven. At, what, let's say fifty miles an hour. So that's, what, 134,165,800 hours, or 559,020 days. So that one little bridge has saved the people of those communities a combined 1,531 years of their lives not wasted in a fucking car. One thousand five hundred and thirty-one years."

"Kevin Spacey – Sam Rogers"

"I run Risk Management. I don't really see how that's a natural place to start cutting jobs."

"Paul Bettany – Will Emerson"

"Thank you all for coming in a little early this morning. I know yesterday was pretty bad, and I wish I could say that today is going to be less so, but that isn't going to be the case. Now, I'm supposed to read this statement to you all here, but why don't you just read it on your own time, and I'll just tell you what the fuck is going on here. I've been here all night, meeting with the Executive Committee, and the decision has been made to unwind a considerable position of the firm's holdings in several key asset classes. The crux of it is, in the firm's thinking, the party's over as of this morning. There's going to be considerable turmoil in markets for the foreseeable future, and they believe it is better that this turmoil begins with us. As a result, the firm has decided to liquidate its majority position of fixed-income MBS … today. These are your packets; you will see what accounts you're responsible for today. I'm sure it hasn't taken you long to understand the implications of this sale on your relationships with your counterparties and, as a result, on your careers. I have expressed this reality to the Executive Committee, and they understand. As a result, if you achieve a 93% sale of your assets, you will receive a $1.4 million one-off bonus. If the floor, as a whole, achieves a 93% sale, you will get an additional $1.3 million apiece. For those of you who have never been through this before, this is what the beginning of a fire sale looks like. I cannot begin to tell you how important the first hour and a half is going to be. I want you to hit every bite you can find: dealers, brokers, clients, your mother if she's buying. And no swaps; it's outgoing only, today. Obviously, this is not going down the way that any of us would have hoped, but … the ground is shifting below our feet. And, apparently, there's no other way out."

"I'll do it, John, but not because of your little speech. But because I need the money. Hard to believe after all these years, but I... I need the money."