- It's no good explaining to people why one lives in Hollywood. They either understand or they don't.
- [of Princess Margaret] Quite a common little thing.
- [asked how he felt about being best known to the general public for having inspired Cabaret (1972)] Any ruffled feelings that I might have have been soothed by checks arriving.
- I'll bet Shakespeare compromised himself a lot; anybody who's in the entertainment industry does to some extent.
- I feel it's so easy to condemn this country [the United States]; but they don't understand that this is where the mistakes are being made - and made first, so that we're going to get the answers first.
- I'm horrified to find, as I look at these diaries of twenty-five years ago or more, that I don't remember who the people were. "Bill and Tony were constantly in and out. We went to La Jolla." I haven't the bluest idea who they were!
- There is no security in your mansions or your fortresses, your family vaults or your banks or your double beds. Understand this fact, and you will be free. Accept it, and you will be happy.
- You've got to think, to discriminate, to exercise your own free will and judgment. And you must do this, I repeat, without tension, quite rationally and calmly. For if you give way to fury against the hypnotists, if you smash the radio and tear the newspapers to shreds, you will only rush to the other extreme and fossilize into defiant eccentricity.
- A minority has its own kind of aggression. It absolutely dares the majority to attack it. It hates the majority - not without a cause, I grant you. It even hates the other minorities - because all minorities are in competition: each one proclaims that its sufferings are the worst and its wrongs are the blackest. And the more they all hate, and the more they're all persecuted, the nastier they become!
- Let's face it, minorities are people who probably look and act and think differently from us and have faults we don't have.
- California is a tragic country - like Palestine, like every Promised Land. Its short history is a fever-chart of migrations - the land rush, the gold rush, the oil rush, the movie rush, the Okie fruit-picking rush, the wartime rush to the aircraft factories - followed, in each instance, by counter-migrations of the disappointed and unsuccessful, moving sorrowfully homeward.
- I must honor those who fight of their own free will. And I must try to imitate their courage by following my path as a pacifist, wherever it takes me.
- Do you think it makes people nasty to be loved? You know it doesn't! Then why should it make them nice to be loathed?
- Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure. Can't you see what nonsense that is? What's to prevent the bad from being persecuted by the worse? Did all the Christian victims in the arena have to be saints?
- Never again give way to embarrassment, never deny the rights of your tribe, never apologize for its existence, never think of sacrificing himself masochistically on the altar of that false god of the totalitarians, the Greatest Good of the Greatest Number - whose priests are alone empowered to decide what "good" is.
- Suppose I have a Nazi Army at my mercy. I can blow it up by pressing a button. The men in that Army are notorious for torturing and murdering civilians... all except for one of them: Heinz. Will I press the button? No. Now suppose I know that Heinz himself, out of cowardice or moral infection, has become as bad as they are and takes part in all their crimes? Will I press that button, even so? Of course not. Now suppose that Army goes into action and has just one casualty: Heinz himself. Will I press the button now and destroy his fellow criminals? No. Once I have refused to press that button because of Heinz, I can never press it. Because every man in that Army could be someone's Heinz, and I have no right to play favorites.
- I often feel that worse than the most fiendish Nazis were those Germans who went along with the persecution of the Jews not because they really disliked them but because it was the thing.
- Screenwriting, to me, is the most absorbing of all games.
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