Killer Film Quotes – The Classics

No CGI, often in glorious black-and-white, but here’s a bunch of reminders why the old films can still be music to the ears:

Q (Peter Lorre): “You despise me, don’t you?” A (Humphrey Bogart): “If I gave you any thought, I probably would.” [Casablanca] (see our link for more quotes from the typewriters of the Brothers Epstein and Howard Koch)

“The Children of the night…what music they make!” [Dracula]

Rufus T. Firefly: “Go, and never darken my towels again!” [Duck Soup]

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” [Gone With the Wind]

Private Eye Sam Spade to gunsel Wilmer: “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.” [The Maltese Falcon]

Otis B. Driftwood: “You’re willing to pay him a thousand dollars a night just for singing? Why, you can get a phonograph record of Minnie the Moocher for 75 cents. And for a buck and a quarter, you can get Minnie.” [A Night at the Opera]

“Everything begins, and ends, at exactly the right time and place.” [Picnic at Hanging Rock]

“Nobody’s Perfect.” [Some Like it Hot]

“Oh, that’s silly. No woman could ever run for President. She’d have to admit she’s over 35.” [State of the Union]

“You politicians have stayed professionals only because the voters have remained amateurs.” [State of the Union]

“President…my big toe would make a better President.” [Sweet Smell of Success]

Cynical copper Trevor Howard, to a writer of pulp westerns: “I never knew there were snake charmers in Texas.” [The Third Man]

“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance.  In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”  [The Third Man]

“I have about the same interest in jewellery that I have in politics, horse racing, modern poetry or women who need weird excitement…none.” [To Catch a Thief]

“It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” [To Kill a Mockingbird]