Oliver Stone Quotes

I've changed my style constantly, so I'm not sure I have one defined style, except perhaps style of subject matter.

Coming Home had been made before and Apocalypse Now and Deer Hunter, different kinds of movies.

We pray for no destruction, and for the forces of destruction not to take over.

JFK was leading the world, leading the United States into a new position with the Soviet Union. He was calling for the end of the Cold War. He would have been reelected in 1964 because he was vastly popular.

[When making movies I] set out to be authentic to [myself] and to put it down the way [I] feel it and know it and interpret it. And then others sometimes key into it and get it.

I wish that George W. Bush had gone to Vietnam, because he would have seen history in a different light. He would've experienced it in a different light because I don't think he understood the nature of war.

Very few people know that there is a whole school of historians that have existed in the United States from the 1940s and the early '50s that were revisionists. They were attacking the whole basis of the history of the Cold War. People like D.F. Fleming, William Appleman Williams.

I believe in intermissions. I lived through this experience with JFK and Nixon. JFK should have had an intermission. It should have come right after the Donald Sutherland scene, because then there's just too much information flooding in. You need a break. Same on Nixon. It was a long film, but I couldn't help it, with that kind of subject.

The U.S. ultimately decides what the national security threat is. They put Russia one, Iran two, China three - the terrorists are down the list. But it's amazing to me that we can still consider Russia a threat. On the contrary, they've been very helpful in the Middle East, trying to calm the situation and respect the rights of sovereign countries to exist. It's the U.S. that hasn't - whether in Serbia, the old Yugoslavia, in Africa, and now, Iraq.

The truth is not being aired in the West. It’s a surreal perversion of history that’s going on once again, as in Bush pre-Iraq ‘WMD’ campaign.

I knew that one day I would come to this point that I would make something so outrageous and so ambitious that... it'd be that Don Quixote feeling, that I'd have to tilt at a windmill. Sometimes you've got to do it. That's the only way you can do things.

In digital, you can maintain the quality.

I was trying to find out what happened in my lifetime, because I was an older man. We lived through two terms of George Bush, and I was wondering, "Is he an exception to the rule, or he is a continuation? What is driving all these wars? What is driving this attitude of aggressiveness and militarism?" I got my answer - and it was a shocking answer. I found is this whole strain of history, this whole school has been denied by the media. It is a bizarre blindness, because we are such an intelligent country. It's bizarre that we can't get our own history straight.

I do believe there are leaders who are like lightning and they come along and they lead. The Lincolns of the world, the Alexander the Greats, they do exist. They have existed.

We should look to (Castro) as one of the Earth's wisest people, one of the people we should consult.

I'm going to hold onto my Blu-ray collection because I really think it's hardware and it's important. I don't want to live in a cloud, all my life.

It's interesting that when economic times were the hardest, that's when many people embraced liberalism.

I think there is a whole older generation that will go to movies still. People like me; people over 45.

I see films in theaters, and I enjoy films. I enjoy the art of storytelling, and the different ways to tell them.

Fear may very well be a caveman fear of the predator, of the giant lizard chasing them - maybe that's what Steven Spielberg connects with so well in Lost World.

I like automatic weapons. I fought for my right to use them in Vietnam.

I don't think most people in the US realize how important WikiLeaks is and why Julian's case needs support.

A woman can be very beautiful and an ideal model and she will photograph incredibly well, but she'll appear in film and it won't work. What works is some fusion of physical beauty with some mental field or whatever you call it. I don't know.

I'm trying to understand my life. The one that I've experienced.

As a dramatist, I don't have politics.

Venezuela is a democratically elected government. These people who keep protesting are sore losers.

I would vote for the man who's lived life, who's done different occupations, who's been out in the real world and struggled to make a living, struggled to raise a family, struggled with life as it exists. So I'd vote for experience, honest experience.

I will come out with my interpretation. If I'm wrong, fine. It will become part of the debris of history, part of the give and take.

We all know what we know. We experience with our minds and breath.

Well first of all you have to make the character strong so that people can follow that. And then hopefully that character can integrate with the background of the social situation that people can recognize.

Robert Kagan said the neocons couldn't get a better president than Hillary Clinton, who would enforce the neocon foreign policy. No one's questioned it.

Horses are very difficult to shoot.

I may have disparaged the idea that people are looking at films on smaller and smaller screens... it's a shame that people have to watch DVDs with the lights on in a television-type situation where people are wandering in and out of the room. Movies are different from television, and you cannot watch movies like television. It distorts it.

I've seen my kids' work at school, and I think they're better than when I was young, 'cause I was brainwashed into anti-Communism. This is a much more interesting view of history than I've ever seen, and I hope to God it works. It's classic history, classically told. No talking heads. Just pure archival footage and a storyline.

Bin Laden was completely protected by the oil companies in this country who told [President] Bush not to go after him because it would piss off the Saudis.

There was a certain faction in America that had always been pro-Nazi, including the Allen Dulles people. These were businessmen, Wall Street men.

My home in Hollywood is not a home. I do a film here, a film there, as they want it. I don't have a relationship. Like, Warner Bros. has a great relationship with Clint Eastwood and takes care of him.

Сyber-warfare is obviously the future. It's a real concern, but we lie so much about what we do that it's hard to know what's going on unless you really follow it.

Now, we live in an age where we have so much information that we do tend to overload. The Greeks did too, though.

I've changed my style constantly, so I'm not sure I have one defined style, except perhaps style of subject matter. But you learn as you go, I suppose.

Franklin Roosevelt is one of the great leaders because he does get along with other people. He makes this huge effort. He's a very charming man. He tries to bring Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill into this tripartite agreement to run the world. And he really was close. If he hadn't died in April of '45, the whole history would be different.

Each actor requires a different language.

There's an electrical thing about movies.

People will go to clean theaters; they don't like to go to dirty theaters.

The beauty of history is that historians have the ability to find patterns, the big picture. When you make a movie, you try to find that. I'm doing in the cinema what historians try to do in their own media.

I've been to war, and it's not easy to kill. It's bloody and messy and totally horrifying, and the consequences are serious.

But in answer to your question about the conspiracy angle, I think that any historian worth his salt, and this is where I fault Stephen Ambrose and a lot of these guys who attack me - not all of life is a result of conspiracy by any means! Accident occurs alongside conspiracy.

Well, George W.Bush wanted to privatize Social Security. It's an ideological thing.