Paddy Chayefsky Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

It's always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a hell it is. And it's always the war widows who lead the Memorial Day parades.

Paddy Chayefsky
You've done the morally right thing. God save us all from people who do the morally right thing. It's always the rest of us who get broken in half.

Paddy Chayefsky
It's hard for me to take your despair very seriously, Doctor. You obviously enjoy it so much.

Paddy Chayefsky
Howard Beale is processed, instant God, and right now it looks like he might just go over bigger than Mary Tyler Moore.

Paddy Chayefsky
You British plundered half the world for your own profit. Let's not pass it off as the Age of Enlightenment.

Paddy Chayefsky
All my brothers and brothers-in-laws tell me what a good-hearted guy I am. You don't get to be good-hearted by accident. You get kicked around long enough, you become a professor of pain.

Paddy Chayefsky
We all live with it. That unbearable terror is what makes us such singular creatures. We hide from it, we succumb to it, mostly we defy it! We build fragile little structures to keep it out. We love, we raise families, we work, we make friends. We write poems...

Paddy Chayefsky
I used to adore my old man because he was always so kind. That's one of the most beautiful things I have in my life — the way my father and mother were. And my father was a real ugly man. So it doesn't matter if you look like a gorilla. You see, dogs like us, we ain't such dogs as we think we are.

Paddy Chayefsky
War isn't a fraud, Charlie, it's very real. At least that's what you always tried to tell me, isn't it? That we shall never get rid of war by pretending it's unreal? It's the virtue of war that's the fraud, not war itself. It's the valor and the self-sacrifice and the goodness of war that needs the exposing. And here you are being brave and self-sacrificing, positively clanking with moral fervor, perpetuating the very things you detest merely to do "the right thing". Honestly, Charlie, your conversion to morality is really quite funny. All this time I've been terrified of becoming Americanized, and you, you silly ass, have turned into a bloody Englishman

Paddy Chayefsky
I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it any more.

Paddy Chayefsky
I don't want to know what's good, or bad, or true. I let God worry about the truth. I just want to know the momentary fact about things. Life isn't good, or bad, or true. It's merely factual, it's sensual, it's alive. My idea of living sensual facts are you, a home, a country, a world, a universe. In that order. I want to know what I am, not what I should be.

Paddy Chayefsky
You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to believe that the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you: you dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion!

Paddy Chayefsky
There's lots of things I'd die for, Emily; my home, my family, my country. But that's love, not principle.

Paddy Chayefsky
I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!

Paddy Chayefsky
Television is not the truth. Television's a goddamned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business.

Paddy Chayefsky
When I say impotent, I mean I've lost even my desire to work. That's a hell of a lot more primal passion than sex. I've lost my reason for being. My purpose. The only thing I ever truly loved. … We have established the most enormous, medical entity ever conceived and people are sicker than ever! WE CURE NOTHING! WE HEAL NOTHING! The whole goddamn wretched world is strangulating in front of our eyes. That's what I mean when I say impotent. You don't know what the hell I'm talking about, do you?... I'm tired. I'm very tired, Miss Drummond. And I hurt. And I've got nothing going for me anymore. Can you understand that?... And you also understand that the only admissible matter left is death.

Paddy Chayefsky
Now what in hell am I going to tell this boy Schaefer's parents? That a substitute nurse assassinated him because she couldn't tell the doctors from the patients on the floor?

Paddy Chayefsky
I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it and stick your head out and yell: 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this any more!'

Paddy Chayefsky
I was in that ultimate moment of terror that is the beginning of life. It is nothing. Simple, hideous nothing. The final truth of all things is that there is no final Truth. Truth is what's transitory. It's human life that is real.

Paddy Chayefsky
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality — one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

Paddy Chayefsky
We shall never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on the ministers and generals, or warmongering imperialists, or all the other banal bogeys. It's the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers. The rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We wear our widow's weeds like nuns, Mrs. Barham, and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices.

Paddy Chayefsky
You don't like her. My mother don't like her. She's a dog and I'm a fat, ugly man. Well, all I know is I had a good time last night. I'm gonna have a good time tonight. If we have enough good times together, I'm gonna get down on my knees and I'm gonna beg that girl to marry me.

Paddy Chayefsky
You're forever falling for men on their last nights on furlough. That's about the limit of your commitments, one night, a day, a month. You prefer lovers to husbands, hotels to homes. You'd rather grieve than live.

Paddy Chayefsky