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

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

Artists don't talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it's stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.

I don't know what's good, or bad, or true. I let God worry about truth. I just want to know the momentary fact of things. Life isn't good, or bad, or true. It's merely factual. It's sensual. It's alive!

I'm not sentimental about war. I see nothing noble in widows.

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!

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic, and sub-atomic, and galactic structure of things today. And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature! And you will atone! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?