Oliver Stone quotes
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One of the joys of going to the movies was that it was trashy, and we should never lose that.
-- Oliver Stone -
The second [presidential] term changes, and I think that John F. Kennedy certainly ran on that and he knew that second term would give him oxygen, and he needed it. Unfortunately, he didn't get there.
-- Oliver Stone -
A woman can be very beautiful and an ideal model and she will photograph incredibly well, but she'll appear in film and it won't work. What works is some fusion of physical beauty with some mental field or whatever you call it. I don't know.
-- Oliver Stone -
This myth that America has this atomic bomb that makes us right, it makes us good, it makes us set the agenda for the world. Everywhere, we can go global, we determine.
-- Oliver Stone -
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Anybody who's been through a divorce will tell you that at one point. they've thought murder. The line between thinking murder and doing murder isn't that major.
-- Oliver Stone -
When you look at the global situation, if America learned to be one of the many countries in the world and to find its way to cooperate with people and bring a global peace that could bring great prosperity to this globe, there is still a chance of that, and that's a big lesson from history. We are not paying attention to that.
-- Oliver Stone -
I think experience will teach you a combination of liberalism and conservatism. We have to be progressive and at the same time we have to retain values. We have to hold onto the past as we explore the future.
-- Oliver Stone -
If we [Americans] are a strong people, a united people, why do we always have to hear how great we are? What is this self-love? Where does this come from? It got worse, because after the war we thought we'd won it. That's the first myth. Frankly, Russia won it. The Soviet Union sacrificed far greater form than anyone else to win that war. Secondly, we had the atomic bomb. We should not have dropped it on Japan. We did as an example to the Soviets, not to defeat Japan and to save American lives. These are myths that we explode with a lot of research early on.
-- Oliver Stone -
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I would vote for the man who's lived life, who's done different occupations, who's been out in the real world and struggled to make a living, struggled to raise a family, struggled with life as it exists. So I'd vote for experience, honest experience.
-- Oliver Stone -
What needs to happen is more of a global understanding, and I believe the United States can work as a global partner and not be the hegemon.
-- Oliver Stone -
Football is mesmerizing, because it's a figurative war. You go in one direction till you get there, but you get there as a team, not as an individual. Players bond whether they're black or white, much as soldiers do.
-- Oliver Stone -
Kennedy was significantly different than Eisenhower before him, and different from Johnson after him. So those three years were the beginning of a détente with the Soviet Union, a new feeling for peace, a seeking out of a new ally with the Soviet Union - the end of the Cold War, as Kennedy called it in his American University speech.
-- Oliver Stone -
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When you look at a movie, you look at a director's thought process.
-- Oliver Stone -
JFK was leading the world, leading the United States into a new position with the Soviet Union. He was calling for the end of the Cold War. He would have been reelected in 1964 because he was vastly popular.
-- Oliver Stone -
Hell is the impossibility of reason.
-- Oliver Stone -
I'd like to be honest to my time, and I lived from 1946, and I want to understand why our country, which I love so much, and was a great country when I was young, it seemed, became this monster vampire on the face of humanity- a vampire squid, to quote Matt Taibbi, sucking out the juices of all mankind. Why? It's a basic question.
-- Oliver Stone -
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Never underestimate the power of jealousy and the power of envy to destroy. Never underestimate that.
-- Oliver Stone -
I was lost, and that war [in Vietnam] was very alienating - not that I was against it or for it, but I was just lost after that war. As were many Americans.
-- Oliver Stone -
I went to Vietnam, and I was there for a long time. [Using marijuana] made the difference between staying human or, as Michael Douglas said, becoming a beast.
-- Oliver Stone -
But in answer to your question about the conspiracy angle, I think that any historian worth his salt, and this is where I fault Stephen Ambrose and a lot of these guys who attack me - not all of life is a result of conspiracy by any means! Accident occurs alongside conspiracy.
-- Oliver Stone -
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We should look to (Castro) as one of the Earth's wisest people, one of the people we should consult.
-- Oliver Stone -
Many films are forgotten and deserve to be, but others glom onto the DNA and they keep a share of the collective consciousness. It's a profound question: What are we here for? What is the purpose, the sum effect of our work?
-- Oliver Stone -
One of my fantasies in my life has been that I was granted access with a camera to go back in time, and to film the actual campaign of Alexander crossing into India through Iran and Persia.
-- Oliver Stone -
The worst nightmare I ever had about Vietnam was that I had to go back. I woke up in a sweat, in total terror.
-- Oliver Stone -
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I've liked different women at different times in my life. I've been attracted to white women. I've been attracted to black women. I've been attracted to Asian women. I've been attracted to various subspecies of women. I can say with gratitude that I've been able to experiment.
-- Oliver Stone -
I might as well be myself. Everyone else is taken.
-- Oliver Stone -
I do believe there are leaders who are like lightning and they come along and they lead. The Lincolns of the world, the Alexander the Greats, they do exist. They have existed.
-- Oliver Stone -
Coming Home had been made before and Apocalypse Now and Deer Hunter, different kinds of movies.
-- Oliver Stone -
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I'm terrible at horror movies, by the way. I get scared so easily.
-- Oliver Stone -
But I suppose film is distinctive because of its nature, of its being able to cut through time with editing.
-- Oliver Stone -
I've been to war, and it's not easy to kill. It's bloody and messy and totally horrifying, and the consequences are serious.
-- Oliver Stone -
It's interesting that when economic times were the hardest, that's when many people embraced liberalism.
-- Oliver Stone -
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There's an electrical thing about movies.
-- Oliver Stone -
Fear may very well be a caveman fear of the predator, of the giant lizard chasing them - maybe that's what Steven Spielberg connects with so well in Lost World.
-- Oliver Stone -
I will come out with my interpretation. If I'm wrong, fine. It will become part of the debris of history, part of the give and take.
-- Oliver Stone -
I study history in order to give an interpretation.
-- Oliver Stone -
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You're not a historian, but most historians will tell you that they make very discrete judgment as to what facts to omit in order to make their book into some shape, some length that can be managed.
-- Oliver Stone -
I think that many people in history who had power were bumped off because they had power.
-- Oliver Stone -
I'd love to do historical pictures more, but I don't know if I can.
-- Oliver Stone -
I have the right to interpretation as a dramatist. I research. It's my responsibility to find the research. It's my responsibility to digest it and do the best that I can with it. But at a certain point that responsibility will become an interpretation.
-- Oliver Stone -
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I'd like to do a story about the medieval ages where in every scene you'd sort of feel that you were in the 12th century. That would be great to get that feeling.
-- Oliver Stone -
In any film there's always a historical implication.
-- Oliver Stone -
In trying to make a broader historical point about the range of atrocities the Germans committed against many people, I made a clumsy association about the Holocaust, for which I am sorry and I regret Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry. The fact that the Holocaust is still a very important, vivid and current matter today is, in fact, a great credit to the very hard work of a broad coalition of people committed to the remembrance of this atrocity - and it was an atrocity.
-- Oliver Stone -
I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I'm a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.
-- Oliver Stone -
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I like automatic weapons. I fought for my right to use them in Vietnam.
-- Oliver Stone -
Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, and why we died. All that matters is that today, two stood against many. Valour pleases you, so grant me this one request. Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, the HELL with you!
-- Oliver Stone -
I don't think most people in the US realize how important WikiLeaks is and why Julian's case needs support.
-- Oliver Stone -
Films might get to you and your subconscious and make a little difference, but when the vigilante drum beats, the mob screams and the conformists go along with it. There have to be people who are non-conformists.
-- Oliver Stone -
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Nationalism and patriotism are the two most evil forces that I know of in this century or in any century and cause more wars and more death and more destruction to the soul and to human life than anything else.
-- Oliver Stone -
I do believe that movies are subject to a million interpretations.
-- Oliver Stone -
I never put out a history, I put out a dramatic history.
-- Oliver Stone -
Venezuela is a democratically elected government. These people who keep protesting are sore losers,
-- Oliver Stone -
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Greed-for lack of a better word-is good. Greed is right. Greed works.
-- Oliver Stone -
You do the best job you can. You take it step by step. It's hard enough to make a movie. If it works, that's great. If it means something beyond the moment to somebody, they can take it and it lasts through the years, we'll see.
-- Oliver Stone -
Forget the grand plan. Forget the master scheme. Forget control. That is the bleak but true basis of independent cinema. Inch by motherfuking inch we must, because we have no other choice.
-- Oliver Stone -
I've met people who will go to a movie that I can't stand and they say that they saw that movie ten times. There's something they like and identified in that movie, and I don't see it.
-- Oliver Stone -
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When I was a child, I'd see a movie, I took it for what it was, I enjoyed it. And if I believed it I would tend to be more interested in knowing more about it.
-- Oliver Stone -
Money itself isn't lost or made, it's simply transferred from one perception to another. This painting here. I bought it 10 years ago for 60 thousand dollars. I could sell it today for 600. The illusion has become real and the more real it becomes, the more desperately they want it.
-- Oliver Stone -
[Nixon] reduced the meaning of his life to nothing but power. In the film, we gave this sad figure consciousness of what he was. We weren't right to do that - I don't think he did have that consciousness. But we did it for movie reasons - to create empathy.
-- Oliver Stone -
Well first of all you have to make the character strong so that people can follow that. And then hopefully that character can integrate with the background of the social situation that people can recognize.
-- Oliver Stone -
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Independence is a state of mind. Independence is spirit without category.
-- Oliver Stone -
I make my films like you're going to die if you miss the next minute. You better not go get popcorn.
-- Oliver Stone -
The secret to writing a screenplay is keeping your ***** in the chair.
-- Oliver Stone -
Each year, the The U.S. Army & its contractors SHOOT, STAB, MUTILATE, & KILL more than TEN THOUSAND live animals in cruel training exercises.
-- Oliver Stone -
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The truth is not being aired in the West. It’s a surreal perversion of history that’s going on once again, as in Bush pre-Iraq ‘WMD’ campaign.
-- Oliver Stone
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