Oliver Stone Quotations | Page 2

I'd rather get past the tyranny of now, where you get judged for something based on what's happening at the moment.

There's an electrical thing about movies.

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

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.

I like automatic weapons. I fought for my right to use them in Vietnam.

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.

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.

Forget the grand plan. Forget the master scheme. Forget control. That is the bleak but true basis of independent cinema. Inch by motherfuking inch we must, because we have no other choice.

writing = ass + chair

Obama took a bad situation and, in certain ways, made it worse. ... I find Obama scary in a way that I had not done in 2008.

[When making movies I] set out to be authentic to [myself] and to put it down the way [I] feel it and know it and interpret it. And then others sometimes key into it and get it.

[Fidel Castro] has a very good [human rights] record.

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?

What Chavez has done [in Venezuela] is that he has brought extreme poverty to an end.

I couldn't despise a man more than George W. Bush.

There is nothing inherently wrong with greed as a human motivator-greed motivating evolution.

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.

Obama is now fighting for his life. He's fighting for a federal government. I believe in a federal government. I hope it sticks around. We had the American Revolution. There was this whole tension between the federalists and the anti-federalists. Then we had the Civil War. We had Lincoln fighting for it. And the secessionists were there. And we have the same issue today.

We all know what we know. We experience with our minds and breath.

I'm trying to understand my life. The one that I've experienced.

I am a storyteller, and I do love ideas.

Money itself isn't lost or made, it's simply transferred from one perception to another. This painting here. I bought it 10 years ago for 60 thousand dollars. I could sell it today for 600. The illusion has become real and the more real it becomes, the more desperately they want it.

In trying to make a broader historical point about the range of atrocities the Germans committed against many people, I made a clumsy association about the Holocaust, for which I am sorry and I regret Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry. The fact that the Holocaust is still a very important, vivid and current matter today is, in fact, a great credit to the very hard work of a broad coalition of people committed to the remembrance of this atrocity - and it was an atrocity.

I might as well be myself. Everyone else is taken.

The worst nightmare I ever had about Vietnam was that I had to go back. I woke up in a sweat, in total terror.

Many films are forgotten and deserve to be, but others glom onto the DNA and they keep a share of the collective consciousness. It's a profound question: What are we here for? What is the purpose, the sum effect of our work?

Unfortunately, the truth is that people do go scot-free and it's unfair. A lot of the top drug people who have been arrested are also free.

Horses are very difficult to shoot.

I went to Vietnam, and I was there for a long time. [Using marijuana] made the difference between staying human or, as Michael Douglas said, becoming a beast.

I'd like to be honest to my time, and I lived from 1946, and I want to understand why our country, which I love so much, and was a great country when I was young, it seemed, became this monster vampire on the face of humanity- a vampire squid, to quote Matt Taibbi, sucking out the juices of all mankind. Why? It's a basic question.

Each year, the The U.S. Army & its contractors SHOOT, STAB, MUTILATE, & KILL more than TEN THOUSAND live animals in cruel training exercises.

I'm more comfortable with simplicity as I get older.

I'm a dramatist. Dramatists have a right to look at history and interpret it the way they see it.

The first casualty of war is innocence.

Everyone in the world is impacted by the United States' Big Brother attitude toward the world. We need countries to say no to the United States. The United States is the dominant power in the universe, with its eavesdropping abilities, cyber abilities. And the world is in danger with our tyranny.

I feel like I am what I am.

Football is mesmerizing, because it's a figurative war. You go in one direction till you get there, but you get there as a team, not as an individual. Players bond whether they're black or white, much as soldiers do.

Hell is the impossibility of reason.

Now, we live in an age where we have so much information that we do tend to overload. The Greeks did too, though.

I think our life is a series of adventures.