James Woods Quotes

At the Oscars, if you didn't vote for '12 Years a Slave,' you were a racist. You have to be very careful about what you say. I do have particular views and opinions that most of this town doesn't share, but it's not like I'm a fascist or a racist. There's nothing like that in my history.

In society, there is enormous pressure for us to try and look good, to be politically correct, to say the right things, to be polite and basically to sacrifice ourselves on the way.

The left-leaning thinking that dominates the movie business follows a common liberal instinct to deny the spiritual dimension to every problem, thereby profoundly compounding the difficulties.

That's the heart of it: My shows were not that controversial with the American people. They were controversial with the people who think for the American people.

That's what the right-wing is good at: figuring out the left wing.

We have been obliged to respond to the compulsions of our society.

I was a Socialist for two weeks but when a couple of Socialists assured me I had no right to think differently from any other Socialist and then quarreled with each other about what Socialism meant, I ran away.

It is always easy to take a position when society agrees with you. It is hard to take a position that everyone else in society disagrees with.

The masses, the public, is too strict.

Pat Buchanan likes to say we're in a culture war. The Civil War was a culture war, and brothers killed brothers. I wonder if they avoided dinner conversation about politics. What if this culture war turned into a real war? I'd look back on that dinner and wish that I'd ordered a side of argument

When an opinion has taken root in a democracy and established itself in the minds of the majority, it afterward persists by itself, needing no effort to maintain it since no one attacks it. Those who at first rejected it as false come in the end to adopt it as accepted, and even those who still at the bottom of their hearts oppose it, keep their views to themselves, taking great care to avoid a dangerous and futile contest.

Inside the intelligentsia, the pressure of public opinion is overwhelming. Nationalistic loyalty towards the proletariat, and most vicious theoretical hatred of the bourgeoisie, can and often do co-exist with ordinary snobbishness in everyday life.

As conservatives, we know the media is stacked against us. We know popular culture is often stacked against us. We know the narrative has been written without our voice despite our best efforts.

Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.

In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not", the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by "love" or "reason", he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.

What will people say-in these words lies the tyranny of the world, the whole destruction of our natural disposition, the oblique vision of our minds. These four words hold sway everywhere.

People like you to be something, preferably what they are.

But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying.

There is no faster way of destroying a man, or mocking his ideas, than making him fashionable.

Failing conventionally is the route to go; as a group, lemmings may have a rotten image, but no individual lemming has ever received bad press

Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.

I don't hate Republicans as individuals. But I hate what the Republicans are doing to this country. I really do.

A wise politician will never grudge a genuflexion or a rapture if it is expected of him by prevalent opinion.

One of my quests from the beginning has been to inform people, educate people, sort of train people, if you will, to spot liberalism. The belief that liberalism is the source of the vast majority of our problems, clearly not all, but the vast majority, liberals and liberalism, and the more people trained to spot it, I think, have always believed that it would go a long way to go in defeating it. I think it does need to be defeated.

We live in an age of prejudice, dissimulation and paradox, wherein, like dry leaves caught in a whirlpool, some of us are tossed helpless . . . ever struggling between our honest convictions and fear of that cruelest of tyrants -- PUBLIC OPINION.