Dalton Trumbo Quotes

(February 1940) If they say to us, "We must fight this war to preserve democracy", let us say to them, "There is no such thing as democracy in time of war. It is a lie, a deliberate deception to lead us to our own destruction. We will not die in order that our children may inherit a permanent military dictatorship".

(1970, when accepting the Screen Writers Guild Laurel Award) The blacklist was a time of evil, and no one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil. Caught in a situation that had passed beyond the control of mere individuals, each person reacted as his nature, his needs, his convictions, and his particular circumstances compelled him to. There was bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity, good and bad on both sides. When you who are in your 40s or younger look back with curiosity on that dark time, as I think occasionally you should, it will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because there were none; there were only victims. Some suffered less than others, some grew and some diminished, but in the final tally we were all victims because almost without exception each of us felt compelled to say things he did not want to say, to do things that he did not want to do, to deliver and receive wounds he truly did not want to exchange. That is why none of us - right, left, or center - emerged from that long nightmare without sin.

Privately, I believe in none of them. Neither do you. Publicly, I believe in them all.

A good businessman never makes a contract unless he`s sure he can carry it through, yet every fool on earth is perfectly willing to sign a marriage contract without considering whether he can live up to it or not.

I fought fire with oil.

Now the truth of the matter is that there are a lot of things people don`t understand. Take the Einstein theory. Take taxes. Take love. Do you understand them? Neither do I. But they exist. They happen.

The only kind of love worth having is the kind that goes on living and laughing and fighting and loving.

Democracy means that people can say what they want to. All the people. It means that they can vote as they wish. All the people. It means that they can worship God in any way they feel right, and that includes Christians and Jews and voodoo doctors as well.

I will, proudly and by preference, do at least one picture a year for King Brothers, and I will try to make it the best picture that I have it in me to do.

We`ll free every slave in every town and region. Can anybody get a bigger army than that?

I am one day going to be working openly in the motion picture industry. When that day comes, I swear to you that I will never sign a term contract with any major studio.

Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There`s no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn`t a gift. It`s a responsibility.

I never considered the working class anything other than something to get out of.

Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don`t understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn`t like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It`s the kind of a life a decent man leads, it`s something to live for and to die for.

One of the disadvantages of being a patrician is that occasionally you`re obliged to act like one.

The only interesting thing that can happen in a Swiss bedroom is suffocation by feather mattress.

The chief internal enemies of any state are those public officials who betray the trust imposed upon them by the people.