Charlton Heston Quotes

I have lived my whole life on the stage and screen before you. I found purpose and meaning in your response.

[President Clinton] boasts about 186,000 people denied firearms under the Brady Law rules. The Brady Law has been in force for three years. In that time, they have prosecuted seven people and put three of them in prison. You know, the President has entertained more felons than that at fundraising coffees in the White House, for Pete's sake.

I'm not a vegetarian but I want you to know that my four dogs are safe.

Let’s be honest. Who here thinks your professors can say what they really believe? It scares me to death, and should scare you too, that the superstition of political correctness rules the halls of reason. What does all of this mean? It means that telling us what to think has evolved into telling us what to say, so telling us what to do can’t be far behind. Before you claim to be a champion of free thought, tell me: Why did political correctness originate on America’s campuses? And why do you continue to tolerate it? Why do you, who’re supposed to debate ideas, surrender to their suppression?

The big studio era is from the coming of sound until 1950, until I came in ... I came in at a crux in film, which was the end of the studio era and the rise of filmmaking.

I simply cannot stand by and watch a right guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States come under attack from those who either can't understand it, don't like the sound of it, or find themselves too philosophically squeamish to see why it remains the first among equals: Because it is the right we turn to when all else fails. That's why the Second Amendment is America's first freedom.

I've come to feel very strongly, not as a joke, that if you appoint a committee of more than four people, their efficiency starts to deteriorate.

The minute you feel you have given a faultless performance is the time to get out.

We will preach the truth to a new generation: The doorway to all freedoms is framed with muskets. It's time the apologists step aside and let freedom's followers lead the way.

I have played some of the great men in history and I believe in the great man who does heroic deeds, even in these egalitarian times.

We don't think well of our presidents when they are serving. Even Kennedy, with such a short presidency, was beginning to lose his remarkable appeal to the American people when he was suddenly sainted by death.

My dissatisfaction with television as a medium has nothing to do with the audience or the fact that you don't require as much time to do it as you do a movie, but with its technical limitations.

If you talk about race, it does not make you a racist. If you see distinctions between the genders, it does not make you a sexist. If you think critically about a denomination, it does not make you anti-religion. If you accept but don't celebrate homosexuality, it does not make you a homophobe.

I'm neither giving up nor giving in.

In the mainstream film market, certainly in television, sex is handled fairly discreetly. I think the abuse of extraordinarily graphic violence and language presses much closer to the tolerance of public taste.

Moses is the keystone to every man's ethical code. He was the first man of record in history to conceive of the law as separate from the will of a ruler, to choose whether a man should live by grace of law, or law by grace of man. In a literal sense Moses lives at every council table today.

I believe that we are again engaged in a great civil war, a cultural way that's about to hijack your birthright to think and say what resides in your heart. I fear you no longer trust the pulsing lifeblood of liberty inside you... the stuff that made this country rise from wilderness into the miracle that it is.

You can spend a lifetime, and, if you're honest with yourself, never once was your work perfect.

The Internet is for lonely people. People should live.

Above all, a director has to be a good captain.

Doing a picture with Willie Wyler is like getting the works at a Turkish bath. You damn near drown, but you come out smelling like a rose.

One of the [Million Mom] marchers said 'the hands that rock the cradle rule this nation.' I thought, 'no Madame, the hands that rock the cradle rule our families and governments and corporations. The hands that wrote the Constitution rule this nation'.

It's fashionable for modern actors to talk about getting 'inside' a character. But you can't get to the inside without getting the outside right first.

What you hold in your hand is proof of man's power - against which our strength means nothing. It has the force of 100 spears. I warn you, man's ingenuity goes hand-in-hand with their cruelty. No creature is as devious or violent.

Political correctness is tyranny with manners.

In what I think is the most serious problem the world faces, which is the population explosion, we will come I think to a time when measures that are not even dreamt of now will become necessary.

You simply disobey. Peaceably, yes. Respectfully, of course. Nonviolently, absolutely. But when told how to think or what to say or how to behave, we don't. We disobey the social protocol that stifles and stigmatizes personal freedom.

A policemans job is only easy in a police state.

Any gun in the hands of a bad man is a bad thing. Any gun in the hands of a decent person is no threat to anybody — except bad people.

I used to think if it wasn't possible to be a family man and a totally dedicated artist, I'd rather be the former. I'm an idealist and a romantic.

The trouble with movies as a business is that it's an art, and the trouble with movies as art is that it's a business.