Top 230 Quotes & Sayings by Viggo Mortensen - Page 4

As [John] Tolkien himself said, the story [Lord of the Ring ] is not allegorical. He said so when people tried to make analogies to World War II and the fight against Hitler and his fascist coalition.

Perceval Press a publishing house I founded in 2002 and it's still going strong. Strong for us means not so many books per year, but each one we very carefully design and print.

I take my work seriously, but it's not the only thing that exists in the world.

We all experience many freakish and unexpected events - you have to be open to suffering a little. The philosopher Schopenhauer talked about how out of the randomness, there is an apparent intention in the fate of an individual that can be glimpsed later on. When you are an old guy, you can look back, and maybe this rambling life has some through-line. Others can see it better sometimes. But when you glimpse it yourself, you see it more clearly than anyone.

With any character I have played there’s infinite possibilities for how they might behave, depending on who they are talking to or how they react to things.

In other words, I’m against cheating, greed, cruelty, racism, imperialism, religious fundamentalism, treason, and the seemingly limitless capacity for hypocrisy shown by Bush and his administration.

The Road was a movie that has a good reputation, even though it wasn't released very well, but that's a movie I'm very proud of.

It doesn't matter how bad things are, something good could happen always. And it doesn't matter how many excuses you have for behaving in an unkind manner towards others. There's never any excuse for not being kind and it's always better to be kind even if it seems pointless and that in fact is the highest wisdom - being kind. It sounds like a very noble, ethereal, simplistic idea but it's true.

To find a good story, you’re generally going to find it in independent or lower budget movies... I wouldn’t mind doing a big budget movie if it had a great story.

The efforts of Black Lives Matter to bring attention to the all-too-frequent instances of unjustified violence being used by policemen may not be paying off as quickly as some might hope.

Can you join, ask sincerely for affection without sweaty hand of expectation, understanding and accepting if it never is given?

The only thing that I always do - is once I've taken on a job, even just to do one scene in a movie, I ask myself, "What's happened the moment the kid was born, until page one of the script?" To answer that simple question, I have an infinite amount of work to do. And I enjoy that part as much as I enjoy any part of making movies.

I don't speak up about something unless I feel strongly about it and until I've researched a subject extensively and have an informed decision about it.

I think the older you get the harder it is to [lose] probably. Your metabolism slows down, whatever, but I'm a pretty active person.

That is to say, Hillary Clinton is not, in my mind, a satisfying or calming alternative to Donald Trump.

I've been naked physically in movies - but it's a whole other thing to be naked emotionally in a way that's not just a distraction or a character.

The Black Lives Matter movement, the various Occupy movements in Spain and the rest of Europe, in this country, and elsewhere serve as an example of what can be done, and how strong the voices for positive change and truly democratic progress can be.

Kids are shy and they often don't want to make eye contact or say "thank you."

Captain Fantastic touches on that [division]. You meet this family that lives off the grid in the woods and you go, "Oh, it's some kind of liberal utopian fantasy. The enemy is gonna be all these conservative types that they'll probably run into, and that's going to be the story."

Once you learn the idea of what a good guy is, you want your dad to be a good guy, and when your dad lets you down and doesn't act like a good guy, it's disappointing and can make you angry as you see it happen, which is beautiful and very believable.

A lot of people can forget about you in Los Angeles.

[Captain Fantastic] it's a great story. It's one of the better scripts I've read, ever, as far as being great from beginning to end. It handles a variety of characters. You have six children who all stand on their own, they're all individuals. And it touches on a very real issue, which is the lack of cohesion and communication in America right now.

I think it's my job to like any character I play - to understand and appreciate a character, to look at the world as much as possible from their point of view. I don't look at it just technically: learn the lines, figure out what gestures I want to bring and play, and that's it. I like to learn as much as I can about the person, and see what happens.

Having a mixed background and feeling a little bit like a fish out of water in most places can be a benefit.

I think you have to be flexible above all as an actor; different characters have different demands, actors that you work with are different in their approach, or how you get along or don't get along with them.

People are becoming more intimately acquainted with people who are different than them - it's not so unusual anymore.

America is an empire in decay. But we don't have to lash out and do damage on the way down. We can reverse some of the damage we've done. It's possible.

When I was 11, I moved to the United States with my two brothers and my mom. We moved to northern New York, up near the Canadian border, from Argentina, and there was nobody there that spoke Spanish, and because there was no internet at the time, not even cable TV yet, I lost the connection with my childhood friends and the culture I had been brought up with for my first decade completely.

I have to say that I think Bernie Sanders is the first politician since Dennis Kucinich that I've been truly inspired by. Where you actually are truly speaking truth to power, in a legitimate way and in an unpretentious and very straightforward way.

I now realize that I was very fortunate to have grown up in many different places, surrounded by all kinds of people, all kinds of points of view.

It's almost a standard tactic, really, to try to minimize any effort that people in the entertainment business or in any public occupation make to express themselves.

I was born in New York but as a baby moved to Venezuela and Argentina. I've also lived in Denmark, where my father's from. I've traveled a lot, and having that sort of background probably increased the chance that I was going to remain curious as an adult about people who are different.

Looking at acting, in the movies or the theater, and the way I like to look at it, it’s just an extension of childhood play… Kids play and imagine in a very intense fashion and they don’t need any director telling them “You really have to believe in it.” They believe in it completely.

Speaking more than one language and living in a multicultural family and environment did not seem like anything but what it was: the world I lived in.

I wrote a letter to the magazine [Time magazine] pointing out that [Richard] Corliss's comparison of Christopher Lee's Saruman to Osama Bin Laden, and the vastly outnumbered defenders of Helm's Deep united against the Orcs to the "Coalition of the Willing" fighting the good fight against Muslim hordes, displayed the simplistic, xenophobic, and arrogant worldview that makes the government of the United States feared and mistrusted around the world. The editors claimed they had no space to print my brief letter, which I felt was dishonest and cowardly.

I campaigned for [Dennis] Kucinich in 2008. I continue to be in touch with him and I really admire him. I think he's very brave and honest - unusually so for a U.S. politician.

Every once in a while, someone would call me a foreigner or a Yankee, or whatever. In the United States, someone might say something, like how kids do, to point out that you're different. That would come as a surprise to me. As you get old, you either get defensive about it or you accept it and you reach out, because you realize the world's full of people like that.

To strive for something better - at least there's a chance.

If you tell the story emotionally in a truthful way, then you start naturally looking at the landscape and thinking "Wow, we have to watch out."

I met Cindy [Sheehan] near Crawford, Texas. I went out to personally thank her for waiting patiently by the road in front of George and Laura Bush's ranch for an answer from her President as to why and for what her son and others had been sacrificed in the unlawful invasion and occupation of Iraq.

There are people that grandstand and seem to be publicly politically engaged because they like the attention, more than because they're genuinely concerned about the world. But I don't think that's the majority.

In 2016 we are faced with a particularly bizarre and unappetizing choice as regards the two main political parties' presidential candidates, in my opinion.

Because of the internet, satellite TV, and the digital world, you can stay in touch, you can learn about other people from a young age.

One of the most recent things we did [in Perceval Press] is a reissue of a fantastic documentary about Russian prison tattoo culture by Alix Lambert called The Mark of Cain. We've done books from Twilight of Empire, that actually has forewords by Howard Zinn and Dennis Kucinich and others, to books of poetry, photography, painting - all kinds of books.

I trust Hillary Clinton about as far as I could throw Donald Trump.

Perhaps the itinerant upbringing my brothers and I had has something to do with my continued interest in perspectives different from my own.

I think if you don't say something it's lying by omission. I personally think it's immoral.

Bernie Sanders has inspired millions of people in this country.

In December of 2002, the late Richard Corliss, a respected movie critic with a long and illustrious career, wrote an embarrassing letter of support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan in the guise of a Time magazine review of Peter Jackson's The Two Towers.

I look at my job as looking at the world from points of view that are different from mine - sometimes radically different from mine.