“If there hadn’t been women we’d still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.”

I started at the top and worked my way down.

When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society.

People are losing the capacity to listen to words or follow ideas.

What’s happening now is what happened before, and often what’s going to happen again sometime or other.

I love informality. I hate dressing up. I hate to be conventional – and I hate every kind of snob.

Now I’m an old Christmas tree, the roots of which have died. They just come along and while the little needles fall off me replace them with medallions.

There are three intolerable things in life – cold coffee, lukewarm champagne, and overexcited women.

A man is not from where he is born, but where he chooses to die.

I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose.

Don’t give them what you think they want. Give them what they never thought was possible.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it; I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

I don’t pray really, because I don’t want to bore God.

The director is simply the audience. His job is to preside over accidents.

In my opinion, there are two things that can absolutely not be carried to the screen: the realistic presentation of the sexual act and praying to God.

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.

Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.

Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.

The things I believed in dont exist any more. It’s foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now.

Civilization never recedes; the law of necessity ever forces it onwards.

Even in the best and most peacefully civilized countries many occasions arise when a woman versed in the knowledge and use of fire arms may find that information and skill of great importance.

The sole precoccupation of this learned society was the destruction of humanity for philanthropic reasons and the perfection of weapons as instruments of civilization.

In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics.

The whites, who are educated and civilized, swindle me, and I am not hard to swindle because I do not know how to read and write.

Men are at every stage of evolution, from the most barbarous to the most developed; men are found of lofty intelligence, but also of the most unevolved mentality; in one place there is a highly developed and complex civilisation, in another a crude and simple polity.