Oliver Stone Quotes

By creating false environment of a war on drugs, and cruel and unusual punishment with these crimes, 50% of our U.S. population is in jail without having hurt anybody, mostly for drugs.

Unfortunately, the truth is that people do go scot-free and it's unfair. A lot of the top drug people who have been arrested are also free.

I feel like I am what I am.

You can never judge how the film will be taken; you can only make your best effort, and put out what you feel. How it's read, you never can tell. Or remembered for that matter.

I have the right to interpretation as a dramatist. I research. It's my responsibility to find the research. It's my responsibility to digest it and do the best that I can with it. But at a certain point that responsibility will become an interpretation.

It's very important to understand that World War II is at the base of this new policy. From the 1890s on, the U.S. was always imperialistic. We went after the Philippines, and we did the same in Cuba, in Hawaii. We controlled South America. Woodrow Wilson was not what he was supposed to be. He was very much a white man first. "The world must be made safe for democracy." It really accelerates after World War II.

Kennedy was significantly different than Eisenhower before him, and different from Johnson after him. So those three years were the beginning of a détente with the Soviet Union, a new feeling for peace, a seeking out of a new ally with the Soviet Union - the end of the Cold War, as Kennedy called it in his American University speech.

My schooling was very conservative. I went to Trinity School, and then to the Hill School, which is a boarding school, then to Yale. My parents got divorced in that period, and I realized I didn't have a life anymore. I was the only child, so a three-person family breaks apart. I ended up very conformist, very scared, very lonely. I couldn't go on with Yale, just couldn't do it. I'd been doing too much of that for too long. I didn't know what I wanted, but I knew what I didn't want, which was to go to Wall Street and join the crowd there.

In trying to make a broader historical point about the range of atrocities the Germans committed against many people, I made a clumsy association about the Holocaust, for which I am sorry and I regret. Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry. The fact that the Holocaust is still a very important, vivid and current matter today is, in fact, a great credit to the very hard work of a broad coalition of people committed to the remembrance of this atrocity - and it was an atrocity.

I don't agree with Bernie Sanders that the banks should be broken up at this point. But Hillary Clinton's acceptance of huge contributions from Goldman Sachs and others... And we don't debate what Clinton has done. She has a public record. She's been Secretary of State. She's basically a candidate of Wall Street, for Wall Street.

One of my fantasies in my life has been that I was granted access with a camera to go back in time, and to film the actual campaign of Alexander crossing into India through Iran and Persia.

We're all divided, but some of us have children, and we are invested in the future and would like to see good things happen.

I can see a movie and believe the story and characterization and stay proud of it. It doesn't change. Even if it's unappreciated, that doesn't mean it can't be appreciated in the future.

Wall Street is a huge issue. And it's controlling our lives today with this so-called election - we really have no choice. We're really just onlookers. The national surveillance state has not been debated by any candidates, Democratic or Republican. Our wars, our repeated wars - our new war in Syria has not been brought up because everyone agrees essentially that we have to continue doing what we're doing. And maybe even now go back to Libya.

You don't always have to have an e-book. You can have a real book. I'd like to see the old way maintain.

Every movie requires its own style. Just be honest to the story. Tell the story in the best possible way that is different, exciting and original.

You get much more heat when you do something current.

A lot of the good cameraman who we used are doing television work; they're doing commercials for a lot of money. And the commercials look incredible. But what's it about? I made three major commercial campaigns. I enjoyed it, I experimented with it, and at the end of the day I felt no satisfaction. It was like having a fast food lunch.

I think that many people in history who had power were bumped off because they had power.

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

In any film there's always a historical implication.

A life like Nixon's is filled with shame and filled with glory. He loved to quote Teddy Roosevelt: "He was a man; sometimes right, sometimes wrong, but he was a man." I love that line.

Everyone in the world is impacted by the United States' Big Brother attitude toward the world. We need countries to say no to the United States. The United States is the dominant power in the universe, with its eavesdropping abilities, cyber abilities. And the world is in danger with our tyranny.

There is nothing inherently wrong with greed as a human motivator - greed motivating evolution. But there's a huge disconnect between the classes. It is very demoralizing to work for someone who makes a billion dollars a year while you make just barely enough to make it.

Obama is now fighting for his life. He's fighting for a federal government. I believe in a federal government. I hope it sticks around. We had the American Revolution. There was this whole tension between the federalists and the anti-federalists. Then we had the Civil War. We had Lincoln fighting for it. And the secessionists were there. And we have the same issue today.

I think any filmmaker will tell you when they wandered from theater to theater to watch their prints, it was disheartening to see the poor levels of light and the disrespect for films that existed in certain theater chains. It was always inconsistent.

What Chavez has done [in Venezuela] is that he has brought extreme poverty to an end.

There are a few versions of the Alexander movie on video, only two that matter. One is from 2007, and then the one from 2014. It's called "the Ultimate Cut." That is the best version in my opinion. I was unsatisfied with the original theatrical release. It was rushed. It was my fault. I accepted it. I always felt it should have been done the way Tarantino did Kill Bill. I thought, we should release this in two parts with an intermission. But at that time, in 2004, it was impossible.

Never underestimate the power of jealousy and the power of envy to destroy. Never underestimate that.

I think any filmmaker will tell you when they wandered from theater to theater to watch their prints, it was disheartening to see the poor levels of light and the disrespect for films that existed in certain theater chains. It was always inconsistent. And in the lab, too, the photochemical process was very difficult to watch, because sometimes they were shipping prints that you didn't even know were two points off or three points off. We suffered greatly to make these films, and they'd be out-of-focus, with the sound too low.

Nationalism and patriotism are the two most evil forces that I know of in this century or in any century and cause more wars and more death and more destruction to the soul and to human life than anything else.

I think a lot of people misunderstand what I'm doing, because my films are not easy sometimes. They do deserve a second viewing. I think they get misunderstood easily.

I was lost, and that war [in Vietnam] was very alienating - not that I was against it or for it, but I was just lost after that war. As were many Americans.

I suppose in our culture - in our lifetime - we've always enjoyed people who tell it straight. We like our presidents, our comedians, and our actors to do that . . . It's funny. You say that people prefer a tasteful formalism - as opposed to an oppressive formalism - but I do feel very strongly that form follows function.

The worst nightmare I ever had about Vietnam was that I had to go back. I woke up in a sweat, in total terror.

You've also heard stories about how the military-industrial complex really does prefer Hilary Clinton because they know that she's not nuts like some of the Republicans. She will do what they bid. And what they want is basically to stay healthy.

I think experience will teach you a combination of liberalism and conservatism. We have to be progressive and at the same time we have to retain values. We have to hold onto the past as we explore the future.

The first casualty of war is innocence.

I'm not an activist. I'm a filmmaker. I'm a dramatist. My strength is to tell a story, to find a way to tell a story that makes it exciting. Our Untold History was a huge challenge. Snowden was no piece of cake, because writing code and breaking code is some of the most boring stuff you've ever seen.

I'd love to do historical pictures more, but I don't know if I can.

I love films. I love fiction films, too. I do. I love making them, but it has to be the right one. Hopefully, I'll never become a director for hire. It's horrible to make a film that you're not really interested in.

Every time you go into a movie, you go into the point of view of who it is about.

Franklin Roosevelt saw the world as a possible alliance, with the UN involved, of course, where we would never have these kinds of wars again. And he was equally opposed to the British Empire as he was against the Communist Russians.

The past assumes the nature of the present.

Films might get to you and your subconscious and make a little difference, but when the vigilante drum beats, the mob screams and the conformists go along with it. There have to be people who are non-conformists.

Just because we live in a Christian era doesn't mean we're all Christian, necessarily.

I do believe that movies are subject to a million interpretations.

It was a tough experience with Alan Horn, who didn't like anything that was R-rated. So you can imagine he hated some of my films.