As a Western, ‚The Magnificent Seven‘ was a pretty good film. I don’t think it was as interesting or as multi-faceted as ‚Seven Samurai.‘

There is nothing in which people more betray their character than in what they laugh at.

Why would anyone steal a shopping cart? It’s like stealing a two-year-old.

If anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science, since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties.

It is easier to be critical than correct.

Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.

If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.

In the United States, we can do almost anything we want. It’s not like Egypt, where you’re going to get murdered by the security forces.

Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.

The difference is too nice – Where ends the virtue or begins the vice.

I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect – in terror.

I do have tatoos, and I do wear leather, but there are other sides of me, that my film express.

Fame is but the breath of people, and that often unwholesome.

Every formula of every religion has in this age of reason, to submit to the acid test of reason and universal assent.

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting.

Everything I learned I learned from the movies.

Industry need not wish.

His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy.

You see the film, you might be entertained, and if it’s not a great film, it loses its power very quickly. I think even simply acceptable books stay with us a lot longer.

If you consider film an art form, as some people do, then the Western would be a truly American art form, much as jazz is.

To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.

You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

I believe the Republicans have never thought that democracy was anything but a tribal myth.

My folks always let me go to the movies every Saturday. We were really motion-picture goers.

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

If I had to choose a superhero to be, I would pick Superman. He’s everything that I’m not.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

Where every something, being blent together turns to a wild of nothing.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise, you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.

In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America.

It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.

If you judge, investigate.

You just want something else that someone else has, but that doesn’t mean what you have isn’t beautiful, because people always want what you have, and you always want what they have – no one is ever 100 per cent like, ‚Yes, I’m the bomb dot com – from head to toe!‘

Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.

It would be an egregious mistake to ever refer to me in the same breath as most of the people I write about.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

Atoms are very special: they like certain particular partners, certain particular directions, and so on. It is the job of physics to analyze why each one wants what it wants.

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.

Politically there were failures. And also on the personal level, there were tremendous failures.

Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.

A president has an inescapable responsibility to provide direction: What are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to prevent? Why? To do that, he has to both analyze and reflect.

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first – rock and roll or Christianity.

Politics I supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.

Stupidity is a talent for misconception.

Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.

When you’re doing a film and the majority of the film is cast black, for me, it’s most important to get people to view those movies as just movies, as just good movies. At the end of the day, regardless of the color of the cast, we’re all doing the same thing in this business: trying to make a good film.

The only film I’ve enjoyed starring a wrestler was Mickey Rourke in ‚The Wrestler.‘

The intersection of law, politics, and technology is going to force a lot of good thinking.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

I love good film, whether it’s an independent or studio film. The independent films, I think the good ones aren’t necessarily eccentric ones but they’re the more specific ones.

I’m not a macroeconomics person.

I’m not a film buff. I don’t watch a lot of movies.

I guess every single word I’ve ever said is going to be dissected now.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot? The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.