"What a cargo crew at Heathrow Airport does in a day took a bunch of malnourished Sierra Leonean locals ten minutes. By the time Agent Valentine got there, you could find more guns on a plane full of Quakers."

"I was now the best merchant of death alive. I didn't own my own plane; I owned a fleet running guns into Liberia, Sierra Leone, or the Ivory Coast at least once a week. Most trips I had phony paperwork. If the deadline was tight and I had to cut corners, I had no paperwork at all, but I wasn't overly concerned. There was hardly any radar over most of Africa and even fewer people to watch it."

"Conflict diamonds are a common currency in West Africa, also referred to as "blood diamonds" since bloodshed is what they generally finance. By the late '90s, my wealth had caught up to my lies about my wealth, even surpassed my lies. I could even afford to become a patron of the arts."

"In the most AIDS-infested region of the globe, where one in four is infected. Andre's idea of a joke was to put a young Iman and a young Naomi in my bed. And no condom within 100 miles."

"Monrovia itself was like being on a new planet. Planet Monrovia. From the temperature, it was obviously planet close to the sun I rarely saw another white man. And, I never left town alone. Outside town was hell of the edge of hell. I didn't want to even gaze into it."

"President Baptiste was my best customer, but I was in no hurry to meet him. He got the reputation for routinely hacking of the limbs those who opposed him. His seven years of civil war has been described as a relentless campaign of sadistic wanton violence. That kind of sums up Andy for me."

"There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That's one firearm for every twelve people on the planet. The only question is: how do we arm the other eleven?"

"It's not our fight."

"After the wall came down, thirty two billion dollars worth of arms were stolen and resold from Ukraine alone — one of the greatest heists of the twentieth century. The primary market was Africa: eleven major conflicts involving twenty three countries in less than a decade. a gunrunner's wet dream. At the time the West couldn't care less. They had a white war in what was left of Yugoslavia. I did the bulk of my business in Liberia — "land of the free" — originally established as a homeland for freed American slaves and has been enslaved by one dictator after another since then. The latest dictator is American-educated self-declared president Andre Baptiste Sr."

"The end of the Cold War was beginning of the highest time in arms dealing. The arms bazaar was open: Guided missiles, Unguided missiles, mortars, mines, armored personnel carriers, whole tank divisions."

"The problem with gun-runners going to war is that there's no shortage of ammunition. This was the chaos that the Old Guard had always feared. As far as they were concerned, I was giving arms dealers a bad name. But they could hardly report me to the Better Business Bureau. And Ukraine wasn't the only former state with an unpaid army and stockpiles of guns. There was Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Belarus all there for the taking. Of all the weapons in the vast Soviet arsenal nothing was more profitable than Avtomat Kalashnikova model of 1947, more commonly known as the AK-47, or Kalashnikov. It's the world's most popular assault rifle, a weapon all fighters love. An elegantly simple nine pound amalgamation of forged steel and plywood. It doesn't break, jam, or overheat. It will shoot whether it's covered in mud or filled with sand. It's so easy even a child can use it, and they do. The Soviets put the gun on a coin, Mozambique put it on their flag. Since the end of the Cold War, the Kalashnikov has become the Russian people's greatest export. After that comes vodka, caviar, and suicidal novelists. One thing is for sure: no one was lining up to buy their cars."

"I don't know what was going through Vitaly's head that day. What I do know is that Vitaly broke the cardinal rule of gun-running: never pick up a gun and join the customers."

"The first and most important rule of gun-running is: never get shot with your own merchandise. The second rule of gun-running is: always ensure you have a foolproof way to get paid, preferably in advance, ideally to an offshore account. That is why I choose my customers so carefully. Say what you like about warlords and dictators. They tend to have a highly developed sense of order. They always pay their bills on time."

"Fortunately, back then a video camera was a big as a bazooka. Here, I've been running away from violence my whole life, and I should've run towards it. It's in our nature. The earliest human skeletons had spearheads in their rib cages."

"Gentlemen, the new Uzi machine pistol. Big firepower in a small package. This little baby uses 9 mm hollow points, 20, 25-round extendable mags, rear-flip adjustable sights. Silencer comes standard. Excellent recoil reduction, muzzle jump reduced forty percent, sixty percent improved noise suppression. You could pump a mag into me right now and never wake the guy in the next room. [client points Uzi at Yuri's chest] Of course, that would eliminate your opportunity for repeat business."

"The first time you sell a gun is a lot like the first time you have sex for the first time. You have absolutely no idea what you're doing, but it is exciting and one way or another it's over way too quick."

"The next sabbath, I went to temple with my father. However, it wasn't God I was trying to get close to. My contact at synagogue landed my first Israeli-made Uzi submachine gun."

"Growing up in Little Odessa, murder was in everyday part of life. Russian mobsters had also migrated from the Soviet Union and when they came to America, their baggage came with them. There is always some gangster getting whacked in my neighborhood, but I have never seen with my own eyes. I had the knack of showing up five minutes before something went down or five minutes after, not that day. It hit me. It couldn't have hit me harder if I was the one who was shot. You go into the restaurant business because people are always going to have to eat. That was the day I realized my destiny laying for fulfilling another basic human need."

"My father took his assumed identity to heart. He was more Jewish than most Jews. Which drove my Catholicism mother crazy."

"That's Vitaly, my younger brother. He was as lost as me. He just didn't know it yet."

"[last lines, voice over] Where is it that we were together? Who were you that I lived with? Walked with? The brother. The friend. Darkness and light. Strife and love. Are they the workings of one mind? The features of the same face? Oh, my soul. Let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made. All things shining."

"John C. Reilly - Sgt. Storm"

"Nick Nolte - Lt. Col. Tall"

"Elias Koteas - Cpt. Staros"

"Woody Harrelson - Sgt. Keck"

"John Cusack - Capt. Gaff"

"George Clooney - Capt. Bosche"

"Ben Chaplin - Pvt. Bell"

"Jim Caviezel - Pvt. Witt"

"Adrien Brody - Cpl. Fife"

"Sean Penn - 1st Sgt. Edward Welsh"

"Every man fights his own war."

"Are you righteous? Kind? Does your confidence lie in this? Are you loved by all? Know that I was, too. Do you imagine your sufferings will be less because you loved goodness? Truth?"

"Look at this jungle. Look at the vines, the way they twine around the trees, swallowing everything. Nature's cruel, Staros."

"How many men do you think it's worth? How many lives? One? Two? Three? Twenty? Lives will be lost in your company, Captain. If you don't have the stomach for it, now is the time to let me know."

"You are not taking your men into the jungle, to avoid a goddamn fight! Now, I want you to attack, I want you to attack right now with every man at your disposal!"

"You attack hard and center! Go straight up that goddamn hill!"

"[voice over] Shut up in a tomb. Can't lift the lid. Playing a role I never conceived."

"You're Greek, captain, aren't you? Did you ever read Homer? We read Homer at the Point. In Greek."

"[voice over] The closer you are to Caesar, the greater the fear."

"[voice over] I'm dying. Slow as a tree."

"One man looks at a dying bird and thinks there's nothing but unanswered pain. That death's got the final word, it's laughing at him. Another man sees that same bird, feels the glory, feels something smiling through it."

"[voice over] This great evil. Where does it come from? How'd it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who's doin' this? Who's killin' us? Robbing us of life and light. Mockin' us with the sight of what we might've known. Does our ruin benefit the earth? Does it help the grass to grow, the sun to shine? Is this darkness in you, too? Have you passed through this night?"

"[first lines, voice over] What's this war in the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself? The land contend with the sea? Is there an avenging power in nature? Not one power, but two?"

"Love. Where does it come from? Who lit this flame in us? No war can put it out, conquer it. I was a prisoner. You set me free."

"Why should I be afraid to die? I belong to you. If I go first, I'll wait for you there, on the other side of the dark waters. Be with me now."

"Everything's a lie. Everything you hear, everything you see. So much to spew out. They just keep coming, one after another. You're in a box. A moving box. They want you dead, or in their lie... There's only one thing a man can do - find something that's his, and make an island for himself. If I never meet you in this life, let me feel the lack; a glance from your eyes, and my life will be yours."

"Property. The whole fucking thing's about property."

"What difference do you think you can make, one single man in all this madness? If you die, it's gonna be for nothing. There's not some other world out there where everything's gonna be okay. There's just this world. Just this rock."

"I might be the best friend you ever had, you don't even know it."