Quote collection
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"You've also heard stories about how the military-industrial complex really does prefer Hilary Clinton because they know that she's not nuts like some of the Republicans. She will do what they bid. And what they want is basically to stay healthy."
"There was a certain faction in America that had always been pro-Nazi, including the Allen Dulles people. These were businessmen, Wall Street men."
"America is the strongest empire ever, with the largest military. We spend ten times what the Russians do. And they have equal nuclear ability as we do, because they're precise."
"I think any filmmaker will tell you when they wandered from theater to theater to watch their prints, it was disheartening to see the poor levels of light and the disrespect for films that existed in certain theater chains. It was always inconsistent. And in the lab, too, the photochemical process was very difficult to watch, because sometimes they were shipping prints that you didn't even know were two points off or three points off. We suffered greatly to make these films, and they'd be out-of-focus, with the sound too low."
"Gore Vidal said "Nixon is us, we are Nixon." I think we have to acknowledge that combination of idealism and sleaze; we want to be better than we are, and we sometimes don't face up to the real questions."
"Every day that you get up, it's some kind of victory if you're making a good product, or working on a project that can only help mankind. We pray for no destruction, and for the forces of destruction not to take over. We're all divided, but some of us have children, and we are invested in the future and would like to see good things happen."
"When I'm working with another writer, I tend to make a lot of effort. When I collaborate with a writer, I'm not interested in credit, but I'm feeding him stuff all the time that I feel is important to shaping the script."
"Very few people know that there is a whole school of historians that have existed in the United States from the 1940s and the early '50s that were revisionists. They were attacking the whole basis of the history of the Cold War. People like D.F. Fleming, William Appleman Williams."
"I can't tell you how many times at the breakfast table my dad would curse out Franklin Roosevelt. I love my father. He was an intelligent man, but he really didn't like regulations of the Roosevelt style, or the taxes. He was an Dwight Eisenhower man. And that's what Eisenhower did, committed to breaking down the program."
"Cynicism was a school in Greece - the Cynics. Diogenes is a famous Cynic. There was a strong belief in nihilism and narcissism. Those are old schools too."
"I'm trying to understand my life. The one that I've experienced."
"We have enormous challenges in front of us."
"Anyone can relate to suffering in this world."
"I definitely love history. I'm not formally trained or educated in history, but you could say I did go back to college in 2008 to do Untold History of the United States. That took five years. Co-author Peter Kuznick has been teaching history for something like 35 years, at American University and other places. His group of researchers brought me into contact with a lot of books."
"When I go to the movies, and I have to sit through ten previews of films that look [alike] and tell the whole story, you know that we've reached an age of consensus. And consensus is the worst thing for us. We all agree to agree. That's where we lose it as a culture. We have to move away from that."
"People will go to clean theaters; they don't like to go to dirty theaters."
"I think there's a whole older generation that will go to movies still. People like me; people over 45."
"Television has usurped everybody from film. And so have commercials, by the way."
"A lot of the good cameraman who we used are doing television work; they're doing commercials for a lot of money. And the commercials look incredible. But what's it about? I made three major commercial campaigns. I enjoyed it, I experimented with it, and at the end of the day I felt no satisfaction. It was like having a fast food lunch."
"Each actor requires a different language."