All my brothers, my brothers-in-law, they're always telling 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 get to be a real professor of pain.

Television is not the truth! Television is a goddamned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a travelling troupe of acrobats and story-tellers, singers and dancers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion-tamers and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business!

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

Television is democracy at its ugliest.

God save us from people who do the morally right thing. It's always the rest of us who get broken in half.

This was the story of Howard Beale: The first known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings.

The worst kind of censorship is the kind that takes place in your own mind before you sit down to a typewriter.