Stanley Kubrick Quotes

Stanley Kubrick : The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes. # Nations

What does this quote mean... The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like...

nean answered 5 years ago


Great nations think their philosophies and ways of governing are the way and the only way to live. EX: Christianity vs Islam. The smaller third world countries are easy to bully and will do what they are told as long as the money from the great nations keeps rolling in (hence, prostitutes).

I don't believe nations who use this policy to be great nations, but bullies, and unfortunately, at times, this means the USA.

• The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.

  Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928), U.S. filmmaker. Guardian (London, June 5, 1963).

• You're an idealist, and I pity you as I would the village idiot.

  Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928), U.S. director, screenwriter. General Broulard (Adolph Menjou), Paths of Glory, learning a subordinate has acted out of principle, rather than to earn a promotion (1957).

• The first really important book I read about filmmaking was The Film Technique by Pudovkin. This was some time before I had ever touched a movie camera and it opened my eyes to cutting and montage.
  • Interviewed by Charles Reynolds, Popular Photography (1960)

• When I made my first film, I think the thing was probably helped me the most was that it was such an unusual thing to do in the early 50s for someone who actually go and make a film. People thought it was impossible. It really is terribly easy. All anybody needs is a camera, a tape recorder, and some imagination.
  • Interviewed by Charles Kohler, East Village Eye (1968)

• The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
  • Interviewed by Eric Nordern, Playboy (September 1968); later published in Stanley Kubrick: Interviews (2001)

• If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space? ...
  Those of us who are forced by their own sensibilities to view their lives in this perspective — who recognize that there is no purpose they can comprehend and that amidst a countless myriad of stars their existence goes unknown and unchronicled — can fall prey all too easily to the ultimate anomie. ... The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache ... This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware.
  • Interviewed by Eric Nordern, Playboy (September 1968)

• You sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it’s really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas.
  • Newsweek (26 May 1980)

• I don't like doing interviews. There is always the problem of being misquoted or, what's even worse, of being quoted exactly.
  • "Kubrick on Barry Lyndon : An interview with Michel Ciment" (1982)

• The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. If it can be written or thought, it can be filmed.
  • Quoted in Halliwell's Filmgoer's and Video Viewer's Companion (1988), p. 403

• Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write War and Peace in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.
  • Video acceptance speech of the D.W. Griffiths Lifetime Achievement Award (1999) - video and transcript

• One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential that one man make a film.
  • Quoted in The Edmonton Journal (8 March 1999), C3

• Think [Schindler's List] was about the Holocaust?... That was about success, wasn’t it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. ‘'Schindler’s List’' is about 600 who don’t. Anything else?
  • Quoted in Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick (1999) by Frederic Raphael, p.107

• There's something in the human personality which resents things that are clear, and conversely, something which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas, and allegories.
  • Quoted in Kubrick : Inside a Film Artist's Maze (2000) by Thomas Allen Nelson, p.10

• I have always enjoyed dealing with a slightly surrealistic situation and presenting it in a realistic manner. I've always liked fairy tales and myths, magical stories. I think they are somehow closer to the sense of reality one feels today than the equally stylized "realistic" story in which a great deal of selectivity and omission has to occur in order to preserve its "realist" style.
  • Quoted in Kubrick : Inside a Film Artist's Maze (2000) by Thomas Allen Nelson, p.14

• Include utter banalities.
  • Notebook regarding Full Metal Jacket, quoted in movie Stanley Kubrick's Boxes (2008) by Jon Ronson

• He thinks I don't have enough respect for him. He's right.

  Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928), U.S. director, screenwriter. Corporal Paris (Ralph Meeker), Paths of Glory, discussing a superior officer (1957).

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  I haven't had one sexual thought since the court martial.

  Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928), U.S. director, screenwriter. Corporal Paris (Ralph Meeker), Paths of Glory, before being led to his execution (1957).

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  The mission is too important to allow you to jeopardize it.

  Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928), U.S. director, screenwriter. HAL computer (voice of Douglas Rains), 2001: A Space Odyssey, explaining why he won't let the spaceship commander back on board (1968). Adapted from Arthur C. Clarke's short story "The Sentinel."

• Gentlemen! You can't fight in here! This is the war room!

  Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928), U.S. director, screenwriter, Peter George (1925-1966), U.S. screenwriter, and Terry Southern (1928-1995), U.S. screenwriter. President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers), Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, breaking up a fight between an American general and the Soviet ambassador (1964). Adapted from Peter George's novel Red Alert, which he wrote under the pseudonym Peter Bryant.

• When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.

  Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928), U.S. director, screenwriter. Prison Chaplain (Godfrey Quigley), A Clockwork Orange, commenting on a rehabilitation process that programs criminals so they cannot behave violently (1971).

• I'm not afraid of dying tomorrow, only of being killed.

  Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928), U.S. director, screenwriter. Private Arnaud (Joe Turkel), Paths of Glory, the night before his unit goes into battle (1957).

  
  Read more quotations about / on: tomorrow, dying

• Shoot, a fellow could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.

  Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928), U.S. director, screenwriter, Peter George (1925-1966), U.S. screenwriter, and Terry Southern (1928-1995), U.S. screenwriter. Major T.J. "King" Kong (Slim Pickens), Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, discussing the contents of the survival kit issued to GIs (1964). Adapted from Peter George's novel Red Alert, which he wrote under the pseudonym Peter Bryant.

• Don't you think he fits my shoes very well, your ladyship?

  Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928), U.S. director, screenwriter. Lord Bullington (Leon Vitali), Barry Lyndon, bringing his younger half-brother, who is literally wearing his older brother's shoes, before the family's guests, thus humiliating his mother and stepfather (1975).

• You are pukes. You are the lowest form of life on Earth. You are not even human fucking beings.

  Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928), U.S. director, screenwriter. Sgt. Hartman (R. Lee Ermey), Full Metal Jacket, speaking to new draftees (1987). Adapted from Gustav Hasford's novel The Short Timers.

• Private Joker is silly and he's ignorant but he's got guts and guts is enough.

  Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928), U.S. director, screenwriter. Sgt. Hartman (R. Lee Ermey), Full Metal Jacket, explaining why a private was given new responsibilities (1987). Adapted from Gustav Hasford's novel The Short Timers.

• Your grace, if I am to be so tame as to take this, then I must give up an honorable and lucrative profession.

  Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928), U.S. director, screenwriter. The Chevalier (Patrick Magee), Barry Lyndon, responding to a nobleman who has refused to pay his gambling debts (1975).

• You climb obstacles the way old people fuck, you know that, Private Pyle?

  Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928), U.S. director, screenwriter. Sgt. Hartman (R. Lee Ermey), Full Metal Jacket, harassing an overweight and incompetent Marine (1987). Adapted from Gustav Hasford's novel The Short Timers.

• Anybody who runs is a VC. Anybody who stands still is a well-disciplined VC.

  Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928), U.S. director, screenwriter. Animal Mother (Adam Baldwin), Full Metal Jacket, shooting aimlessly at Vietnamese (1987). Adapted from Gustav Hasford's novel The Short Timers.

• I'm in a world of shit, yes, but I am alive and I am not afraid.

  Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928), U.S. director, screenwriter. Joker (Matthew Modine), Full Metal Jacket, at the film's conclusion (1987). Adapted from Gustav Hasford's novel The Short Timers.

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