Quotes from Oliver Stone

Coming Home had been made before and Apocalypse Now and Deer Hunter, different kinds of movies.

A woman can be very beautiful and an ideal model and she will photograph incredibly well, but she'll appear in film and it won't work. What works is some fusion of physical beauty with some mental field or whatever you call it. I don't know.

Greed is good! Greed is right! Greed works! Greed will save the U.S.A.!

Hell is the impossibility of reason.

Films might get to you and your subconscious and make a little difference, but when the vigilante drum beats, the mob screams and the conformists go along with it. There have to be people who are non-conformists.

To fail is not tragic. To be human, is.

The secret to writing a screenplay is keeping you ass in the chair. (ASS + CHAIR = PAGES!)

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other religions were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. … And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.

The Nation observed, "If you steal $25, you're a thief. If you steal $250,000, you're an embezzler. If you steal $2,500,000, you're a financier.

Man looks in the abyss, there's nothing staring back at him. At that moment, man finds his character. And that is what keeps him out of the abyss.

Let the capitalists do their own fighting and furnish their own corpses and there will never be another war on the face of the earth.

Either you're born crazy or you're born boring.

Americans, like people everywhere, are in thrall to their visions of the past, rarely realizing the extent to which their understanding of history shapes behavior in the here and now. Historical understanding defines people's very sense of what is thinkable and achievable. As a result, many have lost the ability to imagine a world that is substantially different from and better than what exists today.

By the early 1920s, the America of Jefferson, Lincoln, Whitman, and the young William Jennings Bryan had ceased to exist. It had been replaced by the world of McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover, and Woodrow Wilson.

Prominent among the American capitalists with ties to Nazi counterparts was Prescott Bush, the father of one president and grandfather of another.

No greater satisfaction exists now than a paragraph well written in honor of something you value.

Destiny is never clear when it arrives. Sometimes we just refuse to do what we no longer feel good about doing. These moments are mysteries in our lives, but we know everything will change.

Prominent among the American capitalists with ties to Nazi counterparts was Prescott Bush, the father of one president and grandfather of another. Researchers have been trying for years to determine the precise nature of Bush's ties to Fritz Thyssen, the wealthy German industrialist who played a crucial role in bankrolling Hitler, as revealed in his 1941 memoirs I Paid Hitler. Thyssen ultimately repudiated the Nazi dictator and was himself imprisoned.

Such power, so much death in one place at one time. Never to be forgotten.

Motivadas en algunos casos por simpatía por los fascismos, en otros por el odio al comunismo soviético y en otros distintos por el temor a hundirse en los mismos abismos que habían motivado el sufrimiento de la contienda anterior, las democracias occidentales observaban con pasividad

Para la mayoría de norteamericanos la Segunda Guerra Mundial es, quizá por nostalgia, la «guerra buena» en que Estados Unidos y sus aliados triunfaron sobre el nazismo alemán, los fascismos y el militarismo japonés. El resto del mundo la recuerda, sin embargo, como el conflicto más sangriento de la historia de la humanidad.

Without a moral center -- there can be no string family. And without family, we one and all suffer.

No person should ever have to witness so much death,