121 Quotes by Dalton Trumbo

Then there was this freedom the little guys were always getting killed for. Was it freedom from another country? Freedom from work or disease or death? Freedom from your mother-in-law? Please mister give us a bill of sale on this freedom before we go out and get killed. Give us a bill of sale drawn up plainly in advance what we're getting killed for... so we can be sure after we've won your war that we've got the same kind of freedom we bargained for.

There are lots of idealists around who will say, 'Have we got so low that nothing is more precious than life? Surely there are ideals worth fighting for - even dying for. If not, we are worse than the beasts of the field - and have sunk into barbarity.'Then you say, 'That's all right. Let's be barbarous - just as long as we don't have war.

Thank you mister. You fight for liberty. Me I don't care for some.

He would be an educational exhibit. People wouldn't learn much about the anatomy from him but they would learn all there was to know about war. That would be a great thing to concentrate war into one stump of a body and to show it to people so they could see the difference between a war that's in the newspaper headlines and liberty loan drives and a war that is fought out lonesomely in the mud somewhere a war between man and a high explosive shell.

A man can't fight always. If he's drowning or suffocating he's got to be smart and hold back some of his strength for the last the final the death struggle.

There are plenty of laws to protect guys' money even in war time but there's nothing on the books says a man's life's his own.

There ought to be at least as much common sense about living and dying as there is about going to the grocery store and buying a loaf of bread.

What the hell does liberty mean anyhow? It's just a word like house or table or any other word. Only it's a special kind of word. A guy says house and he can point to a house to prove it. But a guy says come on let's fight for liberty and he can't show you liberty. He can't prove the thing he is talking about so how in the hell can he be telling you to fight for it?

They feel guilty for having survived so they pretend the bad things never happened Exodus (1960) screenplay