Sam Waterston Quotes

Prof. Walter Zarrow These quandaries do not end with this course in a week from today. They begin. And I certainly haven't taught these writers for 30 years just so you can drop references to existential thinkers and their antecedents at dinner parties. The crowd is untruth. In an era darkened by the false shade of imperviousness, you and those who pause to question, carry the light. It's been a wonderful 34 years. Let's not be strangers, either to one another, or more importantly, to everything we've learned from one another. May your best years be yet to come. And so for us all.

Ben What choice do you have if the woman is going to tell her? You have to confess the wrong and hope for understanding. Maybe Miriam was responsible in some ways too. You have to discuss it and hope for the best. And maybe you and Miriam can never go back to the old life; but, maybe there's a new one with maturity and understanding; maybe - maybe even a richer one.

Judah You know, it's funny, for our entire adult lives, you and I have been having this same conversation in one form or another.

Ben Yes, I know. Its a fundamental difference in the way we view the world. You see it as harsh and empty of values and pitiless. And I couldn't go on living if I didn't feel it, with all my heart, a moral structure with real meaning and - forgiveness. And some kind of higher power; otherwise, their's no basis to know how to live.

Eugene Sutphin Oh honey, you are hot tonight!

Chip Sutphin You sure can pick em.

Misty Sutphin Chip! Our mother is ]!

Ralph Sterner Help me Betty! He's worse than the dentist in the Marathon Man!

Marvin Pickles There was a lady in the men's room, I swear! A pretty little lady, in the stall right next to me!

Police woman Bingo boys, bust the bitch.

Emma Lou Jenson Come on, lick Mommy's feet. Get em all wet!

Detective Proceed with caution; she is armed. And fuckin nuts!

Mrs. Jenson Keep the change you son of a psycho!

Prof. Walter Zarrow I used to believe in nothing; now I believe in everything.

Halley : He wants to produce something of mine.

Clifford Yeah. Your first child.

Ben You fool around with her for your pleasure; then, when you think its enough, you want to sweep her under the rug.

Judah There's no other solution, but Jack's men. I push one button and I can sleep again.

Ben Could you sleep with that? Is that who you really are?

Prof. Walter Zarrow We can destroy cities, alter the planet irreversibly, speak instantaneously face-to-face from across the globe, create life where there was to be none, even while intoxicating ourselves with it all. And yet, how do we still seek purpose? And where do we hope to find it if we're so busy convincing ourselves there needn't be any? And so we wander, eyes closed to the dark, while technology, science, medicine and godlessness blaze illusions around us, with less to guide us now than ever, seemingly omnipotent, but more human and just as afraid.

Sydney Schanberg Well, it's just too goddamn late, Alan, this country's split apart. We put this ship to sea and it breaks my heart not to help it back to a port, any port.

Sydney Schanberg You forgive me?

Dith Pran Nothing to forgive Sydney. Nothing.

Al Rockoff It bothers me that you let Pran stay in Cambodia because you wanted to win that fucking award and you knew you needed him.

Sydney Schanberg I had no idea that-

Al Rockoff The fuck you didn't! The fuck you didn't!

Prof. Walter Zarrow But then, what do all these thinkers we've examined this semester have in common? If we truly explore to find a common thread? At the outset of a century that would constitute the bloodiest in human history. Along with scientific and technological advancements that would literally make us like Gods. Even as we began to dismantle the very meaning of God. They ask, what is a life? Does to live any longer have a how? Does it any longer have a why? Against a backdrop of industrialization, people will contend with alienation, dislocation, population on a mass scale, and murder on a mass scale. They'll consider the constraints of truth. Whether metaphor or paradigm, with many concluding actual truth has never existed. A nexus in the great human saga, when we dared to trade the organizing bliss, of good and evil, right and wrong, as determined by a creator for other opiates: communism, socialism, capitalism, psychology, technology, any learnable system to replace what had begun to evaporate: the 20th century. My own. But also the one into which each of you was born. For many, an era of hope liberation, possibility. For others of abandonment and despair. A most human century in which we begin really to understand that ] was right: we are beautifully, finally, achingly, alone.

Prof. Walter Zarrow In this void, philosophy at its worst becomes self-reflective, linguistic, semantic, relativism having rendered any discussion of right and wrong, good and evil, to be the quaint concerns of another age. At its most provocative, it asks other questions. Those concerned with locating our stranded selves, when meaning seems to have died, nothing less, in short, then why do we live at all? and what makes us who we are? They ask, what now? And we're still asking it. What will fortify us as another century, your century, commences? Do we abandon finally the search for truths that seem ever more elusive, even silly to some? The ethical? The moral? The good? Principles that by definition can never be prove when so much now can be proved? Or is all this finally and forever pointless? Are we done?

Sydney Schanberg They brought in the whole fucking press corps. They want to sanitize the story. Bastards!

Joe Simplicity of the divine.

Prof. Walter Zarrow You've read Augustine?

Joe Not everything.

Prof. Walter Zarrow Don't worry. No one has.

Joe And in translation too.

Prof. Walter Zarrow I'd be lying if I said I didn't need a moment to process where this conversation has suddenly veered.