Roger Ebert Quotes

A simple rule in dealing with those who are hard to get along with is to remember that this person is striving to assert his superiority; and you must deal with him from that point of view.

Looking at faces of people, one gets the feeling there's a lot of work to be done.

I don't want to listen to everybody's problems all the time. And I doubt anybody wants to listen to mine.

For me, it's a real shock to see American mainstream films. I can't see these films because it's always the same thing to me. This is very American. Violence is very American, and I can't understand these films. Why do they use violence? To show what? Masculinity? To show fear? Defense? What are you showing with all this violence?

The people who tend to get the most out of being social thinkers are the people who themselves are helpful. They're always talking or answering people's questions or engaging in productive conversations. They're not being trolls. They're tamping down other people that are being trolls.

'Farscape' is a fabulous vehicle for looking at ethical, moral, political, and social issues.

My focus isn't Hollywood; my focus is using Hollywood as an example. Because what happens here does happen everywhere. It's just a really concentrated and tense version here.

Sitting in America, we never get to know the other side in any kind of believable way. We have so many movies about Iraq, Afghanistan, and this and that, but there is never a character from that side.

I'm tired of being the bad guy all the time, saying 'no' to people I like.

That's how people live in the real world: forcing stuff on each other.

By the way, two wars are in an endless state of sorrow. Egypt about burned to the ground and all you people care about is my bullshit... Pathetic. Shame, shame shame

Please give your life to peace, justice and care.

I think I got people confidence because I was not looking at them like insects that I would film.

Ninety percent of the friction of daily life is caused by tone of voice.

The truth is people are very nice. The other truth is, it's very annoying to be constantly interrupted. I don't love myself enough to want to share myself with everybody.

People are mostly hot to have a discussion when you're not.

The letter from Dan Gilbert, the booing of the Cleveland fans, the jerseys being burned -- seeing all that was hard for them. My emotions were more mixed. It was easy to say, 'OK, I don't want to deal with these people ever again.' But then you think about the other side. What if I were a kid who looked up to an athlete, and that athlete made me want to do better in my own life, and then he left? How would I react? I've met with Dan, face-to-face, man-to-man. We've talked it out. Everybody makes mistakes. I've made mistakes as well. Who am I to hold a grudge?

It is far pleasanter to injure and afterwards beg forgiveness than to be injured and grant forgiveness. He who does the former gives evidence of power and afterwards of kindness of character.

I think one of the ways you avoid being angry is to avoid being angry at the people in power. They might do crappy things, and piss you off, and make bad decisions, but they shouldn't be hated simply because they're in power. And I thought it was important to humanize them if the book was going to be even-handed to all the different ways you encounter people at work.

In any kind of conflict, you have a certain dehumanization that comes along with it. And it's important as a reporter, a writer, a journalist, to try to restore humanity.

As the artist, you have to live in order to experience life to put that out there, and when you are successful in America and in the world, your point of view is the 5% and not the 95%, but you have to represent the 95% so you have to find a way to experience life the way they do.

Humanity happy, I get benefit. Humanity in state of trouble, or violence, I cannot escape from that.

I learned early that you'd better know what you're talking about. You'd better realize that certain issues are going to be so hot - no matter what reason, what logic you apply to it - you're going to be met with an opposition just because their viewpoint is different, and there's no way they're going to accept your reasoning. Furthermore, they're going to attack you because you will be portrayed as not being credible: "You're an actor. What do you know?"

The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold...The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war betwixt princes.

Charity is a cop-out so traditionally female in its apparent self-effacement that there seems resonant comfort in it. We're no longer supposed to serve the imaginations of men who have dominated us. We are to give up ourselves instead to those whose suffering is greater than our own. Looking down is just as distorting as looking up and as dangerous in perpetuating hierarchies.