Quotes by Roger Ebert

• The Academy is paranoid about its image.
• If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen.
• If a movie isn't a hit right out of the gate, they drop it. Which means that the whole mainstream Hollywood product has been skewed toward violence and vulgar teen comedy.
• If Hollywood stars speak out, so do all sorts of other people. Now Hollywood stars can get a better hearing.
• It's a good question, because a movie isn't good or bad based on its politics. It's usually good or bad for other reasons, though you might agree or disagree with its politics.
• It's funny that there was so much disturbance about having a Catholic in the White House with Kennedy, and when we finally get a religion in the White House that's causing a lot of conflicts, and concerns, and disturbances for a lot of people, it's in the Bush Administration.
• Most of us do not consciously look at movies.
• No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.
• Catholic theology believes that God gave man free will, and you can't give somebody free will and then send in a play from the sidelines.
• The movies that are made more thoughtfully or made or with more ambition often get just get drowned out by the noise.
• The problem with being sure that God is on your side is that you can't change your mind, because God sure isn't going to change His.
• The right really dominates radio, and it's amazing how much energy the right spends telling us that the press is slanted to the left when it really isn't. They want to shut other people up. They really don't understand the First Amendment.
• We can now have action movies with two stars where one might be African American and one might be Asian American. One of them doesn't have to be white, and the other one doesn't have to be the ethnic sidekick. We're way over that. And I think it's happening in society, too.
• We don't have a lot of class-conscious filmmaking.
• Well, you know what, I'm 60 years old, and I've been interested in politics since I was on my daddy's knee. During the 1948 election, we were praying for Truman. I know a lot about politics.
• I'm kind of glad the web is sort of totally anarchic. That's fine with me.
• Movies absorb our attention more completely, I think.
• You can have a movie with hardly any cuts, or very few cuts, that is fascinating, you can't take your eyes away from it... Look at some of the long takes in Citizen Kane.
• A lot of people just go to movies that feed into their preexisting and not so noble needs and desires: They just go to action pictures, and things like that.
• All over the web there are some very good critics and it's become for people who are interested. It's become a very good way to get to reviews and involve yourself in discussions.
• And I think both the left and the right should celebrate people who have different opinions, and disagree with them, and argue with them, and differ with them, but don't just try to shut them up.
• Because I don't give the studios advanced quotes or an advanced look at my reviews. I think the readers deserve to read my reviews before the studios do.
• But the fact is, most people are not going to be rich someday.
• By going to the movies, and because of other things, too, going to college, making a wide variety of friends, moving around traveling, I became a lot more open-minded than the heritage I was born into might have suggested.
• Every great film should seem new every time you see it.
• Class is often invisible in America in the movies, and usually not the subject of the film.
• I'll tell you, I think that the Internet has provided an enormous boost to film criticism by giving people an opportunity to self publish or to find sites that are friendly.
• I am utterly bored by celebrity interviews. Most celebrities are devoid of interest.
• I begin to feel like I was in the last generation of Americans who took a civics class.
• I begin to feel like most Americans don't understand the First Amendment, don't understand the idea of freedom of speech, and don't understand that it's the responsibility of the citizen to speak out.
• I don't think Bush was legitimately elected President.
• I think most people are more susceptible to prejudice than to reason.
• I think that probably the - I don't give quotes to studios. They have to get those out of the paper or from television. So they wouldn't have had my quote opening day.
• I think we have to get beyond the idea that we have to categorize people.
• Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.