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We shall never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on the ministers and generals, or warmongering imperialists, or all the other banal bogeys. It's the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers.

— Paddy Chayefsky The Americanization of Emily (1964)

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More quotes by Paddy Chayefsky

You see, dogs like us, we ain't such dogs as we think we are.

Marty (1955)

All my brothers and brothers-in-laws tell 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 become a professor of pain.

Marty (1955)

I was in that ultimate moment of terror that is the beginning of life. It is nothing. Simple, hideous nothing. The final truth of all things is that there is no final Truth. Truth is what's transitory. It's human life that is real.

Altered States (1980)

Now what in hell am I going to tell this boy Schaefer's parents? That a substitute nurse assassinated him because she couldn't tell the doctors from the patients on the floor?

The Hospital (1971)

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

The Americanization of Emily (1964)

All Paddy Chayefsky quotes →

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Paddy Chayefsky (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.