Famous Roger Ebert Quotations

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"'It will obliterate your senses!' reports David Gillin, who obviously writes autobiographically"
by Roger Ebert
"A lot of people just go to movies that feed into their preexisting and not so noble needs and desires: They just go to action pictures, and things like that."
by Roger Ebert
"All good art is about something deeper than it admits"
by Roger Ebert
"If Hollywood stars speak out, so do all sorts of other people. Now Hollywood stars can get a better hearing."
by Roger Ebert
"No good film is too long and no bad film is short enough"
by Roger Ebert
"No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out"
by Roger Ebert
"Some men would rather pursue happiness than obtain it"
by Roger Ebert
"What makes us men is that we can think logically. What makes us human is that we sometimes choose not to"
by Roger Ebert
"Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. Wouldn't you say, she asked, that killings like this are influenced by violent movies? No, I said, I wouldn't say that. But what about 'Basketball Diaries'? She asked. Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun? The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office, and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it. The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. Events like this, I said, if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; These two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."
by Roger Ebert
"Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly."
by Roger Ebert
"People read the papers not in the hopes of learning something new, but in the expectation of being told what they already know. This is a form of living death. Its apotheosis is the daily poll in USA Today, which informs us what percentage of a small number of unscientifically selected people called a toll number to vote on questions that cannot possibly be responded to with a yes or no ."
by Roger Ebert


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