"Listen, they're gonna be playing with my hands alright. Cuz it ain't what they say, it's what we say. And nobody ain't gonna listen to us unless we make 'em."

"Never fear, Brooklyn is here!"

"I say, that what you say...is what I say."

"Hey, glum and dumb! What'sa matta with you? You get your picture in the papes, you're famous. You're famous, you get anything you want! That's what's so great about New York!"

"What are we supposed to do to the bums, kiss 'em?"

"Hey Cowboy! Nice shine-a'!"

"Five to one that Cowboy skunks 'em! Huh, who's bettin'?"

"Five bucks? We ain't got five bucks! We ain't even got five cents! Hey your honor how bout I roll ya for it, double or nothin'?"

"[first lines; opening narration] In 1899, the streets of New York City echoed with the voices of newsies, peddling the papers of Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, and other giants of the newspaper world. On every corner you saw them carrying the banner, bringing you the news for a penny a page. Poor orphans and runaways, the newsies were a ragged army without a leader, until one day, all that changed."

"Oh, you mean Jack Kelly. Yeah, he was here. But he put an egg in his shoe and...beat it."

"Look at this. "Baby Born With Two Heads". Must be from Brooklyn."

"[singing] If I hate the headline I'll make up a headline and I'll say anything I havta!"

"Nope, it's nineteen, Weasel. It's nineteen, but don't worry about it; it's an honest mistake. See Morris, he can't count to twenty with his shoes on."

"We sell together, we split 70-30, plus you get the benefit of observin' me no charge!"

"Remember Crutchie? [said to Morris Delancy before headbutting him]"

"[David: Hey, hey, hey! What do you think you're doin'?] Runnin'! [continues running from the Delancy brothers as the Newsies cheer him on]"

"[singing] We're a union just by sayin' so."

"You got no brains! Why are we starting to fight each other? It's just what the big shots want to see that we're street trash; street rats with no brains with no respect for nothin' including ourselves! So here's how it is: if we don't act together, then we're nothin', if we don't stick together, we're nothin', and if we can't even trust each other, then we're nothin'."

"Well, dat's da foist thing ya gotta learn - headlines don't sell papes. Newsies sell papes."

"[singing] When I dream on my own I'm alone but I ain't lonely. For a dreamer, night's the only time-a day."

"[eulogizing Dizzy Flores] Somebody asked me if I knew the difference between a citizen and a civilian. I know now. A citizen has the courage to make the safety of the human race their personal responsibility. Dizzy was my friend. She was a soldier. But more than that, she was a citizen of the Federation."

"Lenore Kasdorf — Mrs. Rico"

"Marshall Bell — General Owen"

"Michael Ironside — Lieutenant Jean Rasczak"

"Patrick Muldoon — LT Zander Barcalow"

"Seth Gilliam — Private Sugar Watkins"

"Clancy Brown — Career Sergeant Zim"

"Neil Patrick Harris — Colonel Carl Jenkins"

"Jake Busey — Private Ace Levy"

"Denise Richards — LT/CAPT Carmen Ibanez"

"Dina Meyer — Pvt/Cpl Dizzy Flores"

"Casper Van Dien — Pvt/Cpl/Sgt/2nd Lt Johnny Rico"

"This Fall, TriStar Pictures takes you to the front lines of the next frontier."

"They came to our planet, they destroyed our cities. But on November 7, they'll learn, they messed with the wrong species."

"In every age there is a cause worth fighting for, but in the future the greatest threat to our survival will not be man at all. Now the youth of tomorrow must travel across the stars to face an enemy more devastating than any ever imagined."

"You can't step on these ones"

"Forget the insecticide, bring on the nukes!"

"Mankind just became an endangered species"

"The only good bug is a dead bug"

"When you battle 6 trillion enemies that will eat you alive, there are only two rules... EVERYONE FIGHTS. NO ONE QUITS."

"The paratroopers of the future are here... and their enemies aren't HUMAN"

"[addressing a reporter] Let me tell you something: I'm from Buenos Aires, and I say "Kill 'em all!""

"Prepare for Battle"

"Genocide doesn't compare to this."

"It’s in Starship Troopers that Verhoeven does his job too well, essentially throwing a desperate warning at the audience that says, “The right action movie director can even make fascism look just this cool, guys.”"

"Even 20 years later, very few films’ endings have ever made me so completely question everything preceding them. It didn’t dawn on me the third or even the fifth time I saw this film that the ending is showing us that this has been, as I said before, a propaganda film from the opening shots. Are we seeing a movie that’s actually a dramatization of Johnny’s rise, starring some pampered actor and some disingenuous representation of the bugs? Is this the To Hell and Back of the Starship Troopers universe, with Johnny Rico playing himself, just as Audie Murphy did? I wasn’t old enough to “get” Starship Troopers when I first saw it. I found the violence shocking and off-putting as a teen. It wasn’t until later that the realization of why it’s such an ugly movie caught up with me. As a child, Verhoeven lived next to a Nazi military base in the Netherlands that became a target of allied bombings. The violence in his science fiction films is always brutal, but it’s the sickening sense of the characters being enveloped in a callous world over which they have no control that draws a line under the bullets and blood."

"All fascism is about Us vs. Them at base. The most insidious regimes encourage this enmity not just toward other states, but toward other citizens. It’s in the film’s second reel, when the young cadets all head off to boot camp, that we get a few more details about who is the Us and who is the Them. Some of Johnny’s fellow recruits want to do things like have children or start businesses—but the government regulates all those things and only citizens are allowed, or at least fast-tracked to permission. If you aren’t out there sacrificing your limbs for the military’s dumb wars, you don’t deserve any of society’s other benefits. One of the cadets gives a little shrug—perhaps the same one you did when they imposed the indoor smoking ban in your state. That’s just the way it is now."

"But try this: Watch Starship Troopers through the lens of somebody in the world in which it’s set. Imagine you’re watching this as a denizen of this legitimately scary society. As Republican candidates for president in 2016 went on about possibly repealing birthright citizenship—a legal precedent established centuries ago that stands unquestioned in nearly every country in the New World—this a movie from 20 years ago paints a perfect picture of what a society without it would look like. The film’s newsreels and secondary characters repeat that “Service Guarantees Citizenship,” meaning that if you voluntarily enlist in the military, you are granted citizenship. Nowhere in this sunny propaganda film of an action movie is there any mention of what not being a citizen means. This is a world where the fascists have already won. All society is geared around and idealizes the military. In the film’s opening scenes, when Johnny and friends are finishing high school, we’re given glimpses into what this is doing to society. Their teachers are disfigured and unhinged war veterans. Michael Ironside plays an amputee who fills his students’ heads with war propaganda, flatly telling them that violence is the solution to political disputes, and maybe you should ask Hiroshima how being a peacenik works out, huh?"

"Starship Troopers has the most rock-dumb and dirt-simple plot of any science fiction feature in recent memory: Humanity is at war with gigantic creepy-crawlies from outer space, and a crew of determined youngsters must do battle with them."