Warren Beatty Quotations

How can anybody hate nurses? Nobody hates nurses. The only time you hate a nurse is when they're giving you an enema.

I believe if a private citizen is able to affect public opinion in a constructive way he doesn't have to be an elected public servant to perform a public service.

I don't want to run for governor, but I don't think anyone should put public service out of the question because that's not what a good citizen does.

My notion of a wife at 40 is that a man should be able to change her, like a bank note, for two 20s.

Marriage requires a special talent, like acting. Monogamy requires genius.

Organized labor, if they're doing a responsible job, is going to organize the pooling of small amounts of money to protect the interests of the people who are not rich.

To say that people would cease to come to California if they would have to pay more taxes is to underestimate the advantages of being in California - mightily.

My mother and my father were teachers. My grandmother and my grandfather were teachers. This is something I really know about. Even when I was a kid, it was a profession my father couldn't stay in, because he couldn't make enough money.

You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play.

There's no point in making a movie just to be making a movie.

For me, the highest level of sexual excitement is in a monogamous relationship.

I was friends with President Ronald Reagan and he once said to me, 'I don't know how anybody can serve in public office without being an actor.

When you mutilate movies for mass media, you tamper with the hearts and minds of America.

Being here allows me to make the case that not all aging, narcissistic movie actors whose children could be mistaken for their grandchildren necessarily act with the same motivation.

Although Ronald Reagan was somebody I disagreed with on most ideological things, he was a friend of mine, and he was a very, very likable man. Ronald Reagan, for instance, was maybe more able to get the very rich to do the right thing sometimes.

It's very clear you have to engage the public and say: You have to vote no on 74, no on 75, no on 76, no on 77. Those are the issues that Arnold pushing. And those are reactionary, Republican initiatives.

When I produce a movie - and I've produced a number of movies, unlike Arnold - yes, I'm frustrated when the union says you can't do this, you can't work past that hour, you've got to break for lunch. But ultimately, they're right. What they do is for everyone's benefit.

And the success of the union movement, historically, has always been to benefit all working men and women - not just people who belong to the union.

The definition of a Schwarzenegger Republican is a Bush Republican who says he's a Schwarzenegger Republican.

Arnold has had his spokesman call me a crackpot. That was a mistake.

To denigrate the union movement in this way is to denigrate the right and the ability of people who are not rich to organize and to accomplish things together.

And then the conditions of safety - or lack of safety - for teachers in public schools, and the disparity between public schools and private schools is shameful.

But the Republican right-wing agenda, these people - Arnold and his patrons - felt it could be accomplished by circumventing the Legislature and spending money and organizing and giving sound bites.

I have a day job. I can make movies when I want to.

Movies are fun, but they're not a cure for cancer.

Lenin said that people vote with their feet. Well, that's what's happening. They either go, or they don't go. It's all politics. It's all demographics.

When I saw Arnold say that he didn't need a union, because people in his position don't need it, I thought, this is a very naive way to present yourself. It's also kinda dumb about making movies. It doesn't realize how the union movement even helps the star.

so I can't say enough positive things about Kazan. I would leave it at that. I love the man.

I grew up as a fairly puritanical, Protestant, football-playing boy in Virginia. I don't know that I've changed very much.

He will probably be very flexible now. He'll be very adroit in his attempt to win popularity.

He'll go wherever he feels it's popular to go, and I don't see an agenda other than to please his donors.

I would say the biggest changes -- it has caused me to get into the present tense, try not to go too far into the future, not too long into the past, ... When (the kids) are jumping on your stomach, making a trampoline out of you at six in the morning, that's fun for me. That's present tense.

You have to look inside these Trojan horses and see what is really there. They are deceptively named, and they are not what they appear to be on the outside.

To me, it's a misuse of the initiative process, ... It's a clear device to circumvent the Legislature and spend a lot of money on oversimplified descriptions of these propositions and hope that the Trojan horses, (which) each of these are, will deceive a bored and not well-enough-informed public into staying home or vote in a way that is against their own best interest.

I've always preferred not to run for public office, and I still do, ... Run, Warren, run!

You're talking about a man that taught me more than anybody else did about how to make movies.

It's something that you never take off the table; that would be sort of a demonstration of poor citizenship. The answer is I don't know and the truth is that I don't want to do it.

Oh, I guess it's selfishness. I can make a movie when I want to. I don't need to work as a hired actor. I produce, I write, I direct. I guess I like it.

Arnold says he's not in this for the short run. We have to show him - neither are we!

I know you have asked and I've turned you down.

I knew Reagan and I was a friend of Reagan. I disagreed with many, many things that Reagan stood for, but I don't think that Reagan would have handled things this way. Well, Reagan did raise taxes when he had to and Reagan was never disrespectful to the legislature.

I'm not sure two movie stars can run - not even here.

But I made... ah, several pictures and then it got to the point where I would have to make a good picture or get myself into trouble.

I don't know if I will run, ... interestingly, politically, you have a kind of tactical advantage when you don't know. Because other people know. They have plans. They have exploratory committees. ... So when you don't know you have flexibility.

By that time this society is going to be completely different for one thing. Your own son or your own son's son is not going to have the needs for money that you feel you have now. The society itself will be less dependent on money and currency to get along.

Those people upstairs think that Karl Marx was somebody who wrote a good anti-trust law.

It makes you feel good when a movie works. Usually when I see an old movie I've made, I say to myself, 'Oh God, why did I do this?' and 'Why didn't I change that?' and things like that.

I believe that DVD is that which gives some hope to retaining some content in movies that will appeal to an older audience or the more sophisticated audience or the audience that doesn't need or desire to see a movie on a Friday night.

Basically the tax reform ideas are to clean up the tax system and to eliminate the loopholes that only very few make use of, to eliminate the possibility of people making millions of dollars every year and not paying any tax at all through oil depletion allowances and things like that.

I'm not going to call a dog "Dog." I suppose if she were a baby you'd cal her "Person."

You'd rather have nothing than settle for less.

That's all gone, now, the old, Hollywood.

Government is not show business.

Always thank your nurse. Sometimes they're the only one between you and a hearse.

I mourn the loss of the gigantic screen, but I guess you can't have everything.

I don't think you should talk while the movie was going on and say, 'Oh, look at that - look how smart I was' or 'What a brilliant shot that is!' I don't believe in that.

Just because you need a quart of milk doesn't mean you have to go out and buy a whole cow.

The Golden Globes are fun. The Oscars are Business.

There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.

Women are a problem, but if you haven't already guessed, they are the kind of problem I enjoy wrestling with.

The highest level of sexual excitement is in a monogamous relationship.

In a way, I'd rather ride down the street on a camel than give what is sometimes called an in-depth interview. I'd rather ride down the street on a camel nude. In a snowstorm. Backwards.

Even the promiscuous feel pain.

I'm old, I'm young, I'm intelligent, I'm stupid. My tide goes in and out.

There are some people whom you have in life who have the capacity for real, passionate commitment to something, and sometimes you may be passionately committed to the same thing.

Charity is taking an ugly girl to lunch.

I don't think there's anything to be admired in lying, cheating or philandering. But there might be something to be admired in not burning people at the stake because they have those weaknesses.