All Quotes

"First we have to believe, and then we believe."

"The greatest events occur without intention playing any part in them; chance makes good mistakes and undoes the most carefully planned undertaking. The world's greatest events are not produced, they happen."

"There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly."

"There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist."

"If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind."

"Those who have racked their brains to discover new proofs have perhaps been induced to do so by a compulsion they could not quite explain to themselves. Instead of giving us their new proofs they should have explained to us the motivation that constrained them to search for them."

"The "second sight" possessed by the Highlanders in Scotland is actually a foreknowledge of future events. I believe they possess this gift because they don't wear trousers... That is also why in all countries women are more prone to utter prophecies."

"Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven."

"Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it."

"What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment."

"Reason now gazes above the realm of the dark but warm feelings as the Alpine peaks do above the clouds. They behold the sun more clearly and distinctly, but they are cold and unfruitful."

"He was always smoothing and polishing himself, and in the end he became blunt before he was sharp."

"Bei den meisten Menschen gründet sich der unglaube in einer Sache auf blinden Glauben in einer anderen."

"I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested."

"Perhaps he was even more remarkable as a psychologist than as a physicist."

"We may use Lichtenberg’s writings as the most wonderful dowsing rod: wherever he makes a joke, there a problem lies hidden."

"Lauren Zuckerman - Observation Psychiatrist"

"As a child I always felt responsible for my mom. Dad would be gone. She'd be alone for months, sometimes years, and eventually dad would come home. And I'd be okay. And everything would be all right. 'Cause mom would be saved."

"My father used to shirk his parental responsibilities by saying that life was an illusion; karma was also a convenient excuse for foul-ups. In my mind echos: "Sorry I sold your baseball cards, Monkey, but it's your karma, and life is just an illusion anyway, boy.""

"You're a fag, baby!"

"Throw it all out into the universe, baby!"

"The thing is, Monkey, you'd change if you could, but you can't, and even if you could, you really shouldn't. And stop being such a fuckin' pussy about your curtains."

"Una el coka dieta!"

"Excuse me, very rude and obnoxious stranger."

"Tami Peterson has always been hyper-critical of my performance art. I mean she even delivered a speech in the quad about it called "Imogene: What do You Mean?" I mean, how could she do that to me? I've always been so nice to her!"

"Steve Antin - Monkey Zetterland"

"Patricia Arquette - Grace"

"Sandra Bernhard - Imogene"

"Sofia Coppola - Cindy"

"Tate Donovan - Brent Zetterland"

"Rupert Everett - Sasha"

"Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined."

"The majority of Americans — the ones who never elected you — are not fooled by your weapons of mass distraction."

"I think the United States, I think our government knows where he is and I don't think we're going to be capturing him or killing him any time soon."

"To have to answer anything about what that slimeball says is just too much."

"Well I failed to bring Roger to Flint. As we neared the end of the twentieth century, the rich were richer, the poor, poorer. And people everywhere now had a lot less lint, thanks to the lint rollers made in my hometown. It was truly the dawn of a new era."

"White people scare the crap out of me... I have never been attacked by a black person, never been evicted by a black person, never had my security deposit ripped off by a black landlord, never had a black landlord... never been pulled over by a black cop, never been sold a lemon by a black car salesman, never seen a black car salesman, never had a black person deny me a bank loan, never had a black person bury my movie, and I've never heard a black person say, "We're going to eliminate ten thousand jobs here — have a nice day!""

"Many families have been devastated tonight. This is just not right. They did not deserve to die. … If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him. Boston, New York, D.C., and the planes' destination of California — these were the places that voted AGAINST Bush."

"I can't even think about this movie. I don't WANT to think about it because if I think about it I will have to face an ugly truth that has been gnawing through my head... This started out as a documentary on gun violence in America, but the largest mass murder in our history was just committed — without the use of a single gun! Not a single bullet fired! No bomb was set off, no missile was fired, no weapon (i.e., a device that was solely and specifically manufactured to kill humans) was used. A boxcutter! — I can't stop thinking about this. A thousand gun control laws would not have prevented this massacre. What am I doing?"

"Librarians see themselves as the guardians of the First Amendment. … You got a thousand Mother Joneses at the barricades! I love the librarians, and I am grateful for them!"

"I'm a millionaire, I'm a multi-millionaire, I'm filthy rich. You know why I'm a multi-millionaire? 'Cause multi-millions like what I do. That's pretty good, isn't it? There's millions that believe in what I do. Pretty cool, huh?"

"If the small businesses suck they'll be driven out of business... If they got a good restaurant, people will go there and eat. You know in my town the small businesses that everyone wanted to protect? They were the people that supported all the right-wing groups. They were the Republicans in the town, they were in the Kiwanas, the Chamber of Commerce — people that kept the town all white. The small hardware salesman, the small clothing store salespersons, Jesse the Barber who signed his name three different times on three different petitions to recall me from the school board. Fuck all these small businesses — fuck 'em all! Bring in the chains. The small businesspeople are the rednecks that run the town and suppress the people. Fuck 'em all. That's how I feel."

"You know he's there illegally. You know he was not elected either by the popular vote or by the vote in Florida."

"We know all those facts about Florida and what Katherine Harris did, and the private firm that took African-Americans off the voting rolls and prohibited them from voting. But I've been surprised in this first week how many average Americans were not aware of all of the trickery and deceit that took place in the year before the election to fix it for George W. Bush."

"It was the morning of April 20, 1999, and it was pretty much like any other morning in America. The Farmer did his chores. The milkman made his deliveries. The President bombed another country whose name we couldn't pronounce. Out in Fargo, North Dakota, Cary McWilliams went on his morning walk. Back in Michigan, Mrs Hughes welcomed her students for another day of school. And out in a little town in Colorado, two boys went bowling at 6 in the morning. Yes, it was a typical day in the United States of America."

"You survive by having your fear compass calibrated correctly. Our compass is off now because we're being told to be afraid of everything. The things that we're frightened of, or told to be frightened of, are not necessarily the things that we need to fear."

"What the media are telling you to be afraid of are the wrong things... Fear is a necessary ingredient of our survival instincts."

"These bastards who run our country are a bunch of conniving, thieving, smug pricks who need to be brought down and removed and replaced with a whole new system that we control."

"Hey, here's a way to stop suicide bombings — give the Palestinians a bunch of missile-firing Apache helicopters and let them and the Israelis go at each other head to head. Four billion dollars a year to Israel — four billion dollars a year to the Palestinians — they can just blow each other up and leave the rest of us the hell alone."

"Whoa. On behalf of our producers Kathleen Glynn and Michael Donovan from Canada, I'd like to thank the Academy for this. I have invited my fellow documentary nominees on the stage with us, and we would like to — they're here in solidarity with me because we like nonfiction. We like nonfiction and we live in fictitious times. We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it's the fictition of duct tape or fictition of orange alerts we are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you. And any time you got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up. Thank you very much."