Top 199 Quotes & Sayings by Oliver Stone - Page 3

I think you should do rehearsal and work at it, but when the camera rolls, you should be ready. Try to make it good the first time.

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.

The U.S. ultimately decides what the national security threat is. They put Russia one, Iran two, China three - the terrorists are down the list. But it's amazing to me that we can still consider Russia a threat. On the contrary, they've been very helpful in the Middle East, trying to calm the situation and respect the rights of sovereign countries to exist. It's the U.S. that hasn't - whether in Serbia, the old Yugoslavia, in Africa, and now, Iraq.

Franklin Roosevelt saw the world as a possible alliance, with the UN involved, of course, where we would never have these kinds of wars again. And he was equally opposed to the British Empire as he was against the Communist Russians.

All the Greek mythic heroes had gone east, but they were myths. Achilles was a myth. Perseus, Theseus, Hercules... they probably existed in some form. But they all went east. That's where a Greek went to make his bones so to speak. And Alexander the Great was the first man who actually went east not to plunder, not to loot and come back to Greece - which is where the Macedonians wanted to go back with the money. He stayed. And he became half-Eastern.

After World War II the Republicans - the Wall Street crowd - were very worried about a depression coming back. They hated Franklin Roosevelt in that crowd, my father among them. And there was a great fear in '46 that we'd fall back into the pits. And they always wanted to break up the Roosevelt legislation.

Every movie requires its own style. Just be honest to the story. Tell the story in the best possible way that is different, exciting and original.

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.

From '45, the moment Franklin Roosevelt dies, we're running ratlines with the Germans, helping Nazis escape.

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.

Get the overall. Some of my films may have been crude at times, or tough, or missed the points, but I've tried to get the overall in. I think that's more important. You may miss a thing or two, but you move faster. If you can do it in three takes, do it in three takes.

I look at Homer and The Odyssey and all the disparate adventures this guy goes through, and then he returns home and the question is, is he the same man who left?

I think John F. Kennedy was the last great hope. And that's why I dwell on that subject. He was someone who could stand up to the militarist element in our society.

I guess you could say Alexander the Great was a man who completely transported me and moved me and inspired me because of his idealism, and I'd go back to the Greeks, and I always liked Homer and all the philosophers and their way of thinking and their concept of honor. I think their concept of honor does apply to the modern age, and certain people that walk around are pre-Christian.

Well, George W.Bush wanted to privatize Social Security. It's an ideological thing.

There is a narrative to every life, and I believe in the classic mode of storytelling that goes back to Homer and carries through to today.

Nixon identified himself as a crisis-laden man. He'd reach levels of victory and then he'd plunge into defeat. He was vice president, then he lost to Kennedy, then he lost the California governorship. Then came a great comeback and then he blew it again - and the next comeback, after he lost the presidency. He was a man who needed the feeling of walking the precipice.

What I've experienced, I'm trying to put in a narrative form, I suppose, to say that it does make sense in this way.

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.

Each actor requires a different language.

I'm a history person; I love history. But I am conditioned by the present.

?yber-warfare is obviously the future. It's a real concern, but we lie so much about what we do that it's hard to know what's going on unless you really follow it.

Now with digital, we have much better projection, and if the theaters are charging higher prices but providing refreshments and a clean, well-lit theater, there's no reason why this cannot go on as a senior-citizen-driven business for years. Especially with movies for adults.

The Greek playwrights, we're all beholden to them, every one of us.

I am a storyteller, and I do love ideas.

Television has usurped everybody from film. And so have commercials, by the way.

You look at the Russian side: They're defending their territory from the beginning. They move west to destroy the Nazis. And they take out the guts of the German war machine per Winston Churchill, who said that they won the war. From the beginning, we were hostile to the guys who had saved how many American lives by their repulsion of the Nazis? I think the Americans lost 400,000 in the whole war. And the Americans knew it at the time. They gave Joseph Stalin credit. He was the man of the year, cover of Life magazine in 1943; he was a hero.

Wall Street is a huge issue. And it's controlling our lives today with this so-called election - we really have no choice. We're really just onlookers. The national surveillance state has not been debated by any candidates, Democratic or Republican. Our wars, our repeated wars - our new war in Syria has not been brought up because everyone agrees essentially that we have to continue doing what we're doing. And maybe even now go back to Libya.

You always try to find the right style for the movie. That's the key.

We pray for no destruction, and for the forces of destruction not to take over.

I don't agree with Bernie Sanders that the banks should be broken up at this point. But Hillary Clinton's acceptance of huge contributions from Goldman Sachs and others... And we don't debate what Clinton has done. She has a public record. She's been Secretary of State. She's basically a candidate of Wall Street, for Wall Street.

I gave up on America. I read the Times just to find out what they're thinking. I read blogs. I get most of my best information from people who are there, people who write independently. And there's actually very few of them.

I don't want to make a half-assed film. It's not my area of expertise.

I've seen my kids' work at school, and I think they're better than when I was young, 'cause I was brainwashed into anti-Communism. This is a much more interesting view of history than I've ever seen, and I hope to God it works. It's classic history, classically told. No talking heads. Just pure archival footage and a storyline.

You get much more heat when you do something current.

A life like Nixon's is filled with shame and filled with glory. He loved to quote Teddy Roosevelt: "He was a man; sometimes right, sometimes wrong, but he was a man." I love that line.

Pat Nixon was called the Mona Lisa of American politics. She never wrote anything. Her interviews tell us nothing.

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works.

I think a lot of people misunderstand what I'm doing, because my films are not easy sometimes. They do deserve a second viewing. I think they get misunderstood easily.

Christianity did take a lot of Greek concepts.

It was a tough experience with Alan Horn, who didn't like anything that was R-rated. So you can imagine he hated some of my films.

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.

The secret to writing a screenplay is keeping your ass in the chair.

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.

I see films in theaters, and I enjoy films. I enjoy the art of storytelling, and the different ways to tell them.

[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.

As a dramatist, I don't have politics.

I don't think most people in the US realize how important WikiLeaks is and why Julian's case needs support.

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.

I believe in intermissions. I lived through this experience with JFK and Nixon. JFK should have had an intermission. It should have come right after the Donald Sutherland scene, because then there's just too much information flooding in. You need a break. Same on Nixon. It was a long film, but I couldn't help it, with that kind of subject.

I think there is a whole older generation that will go to movies still. People like me; people over 45.

I wish that George W. Bush had gone to Vietnam, because he would have seen history in a different light. He would've experienced it in a different light because I don't think he understood the nature of war.

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.

Every time you go into a movie, you go into the point of view of who it is about.

I do have a side as a citizen, and I've always expressed it, and that's where I've gotten into misunderstandings, because some people see me as a leftist nut or whatever. A conspiracy nut. All that stuff. These are definitions that don't really apply to a dramatist, because a dramatist is working from empathy.

My home in Hollywood is not a home. I do a film here, a film there, as they want it. I don't have a relationship. Like, Warner Bros. has a great relationship with Clint Eastwood and takes care of him.

Concepts of integrity and heroism and honor are still important to the world today. Some people behave well, and some people behave badly.

Just because we live in a Christian era doesn't mean we're all Christian, necessarily.

Independence is a state of mind. Independence is spirit without category.

The only home I had was with Warner Bros. during the '90s. I made four movies with them then. Natural Born Killers, JFK, Heaven and Earth. Any Given Sunday was the last. And that was the end of the Terry Semel/Bob Daly regime.