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Clint Eastwood Quotes
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Since several of you suckers seem to be deeply misinformed about Eastwood's politics, I thought that I'd quote the man himself in an effort to set the record straight.
“The only time I’ve been associated with anything political is by innuendo or by people’s assumptions that I have certain political aspects. Probably—actually—I’m the most moderate person, politically. After Watergate, I’m like everybody else—thinking, Oh Jesus, politics, keep me away from it—I’m reticent. I’ve supported Democrats and Republicans in California. It depends on what the guy stands for at the moment.”
—interview with Patrick McGilligan, “Clint Eastwood,” originally published in “Focus on Film,” no. 25 (Summer-Fall 1976): 12-20. Reprinted in “Clint Eastwood: Interviews.” Eds. Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999 (p. 36).
“I’m not pro-business. I never have been. The only person who says I am is my opponent. I want to help build bridges.”
--interview with Robert Lindsay, “As Clint Eastwood Runs for Mayor, Small-Town Race Hangs on Big Issue,” “New York Times,” March 25, 1986, A20.
"I don’t know why anybody would want to look for political ramifications in any film. After all, if you love making pictures, if you like doing the whole spectrum, no particular picture has any bearing on what you feel in you own life.
“I’ve always said, for instance, that Adolf Hitler must be a fascinating character to play in a movie. The role is probably an actor’s dream. That doesn’t mean the actor is a fascist.
“I’m just a filmmaker. ‘Bird’ does have roots in my own experience though. I was raised in Oakland, California, around this kind of music. A lot of it is out of the black experience, and I feel I know it as well as any white person around.”
“Nobody understood what I was doing at the beginning and some of them still don’t understand me now. Some people, for instance, still cling to the idea that the Dirty Harry films are some kind of right-wing statement. You can look at those pictures that way if you’re looking to pigeonhole somebody. But you can interpret them as other things too. If you want to take the time to think about it. You can certainly interpret Dirty Harry as an individual going against the system.”
—interview with Nat Hentoff, “Flight of Fancy,” originally published in “American Film,” September 1988, 24-31. Reprinted in “Clint Eastwood: Interviews.” Eds. Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999 (pp. 154, 157).
“I’ve been a Republican because I chose that party at the time of my military service at the beginning of the fifties, and I voted for Eisenhower, but I have a tendency to consider myself more of a ‘free thinker.’ My political choices don’t really fit in with any of the camps, and actually I feel myself to be something of a libertarian, in the sense that I think you have to let people live in peace, respect individual freedoms.”
—interview with Thierry Jousse and Camille Nevers, “Clint Eastwood,” originally published in “Cahiers du cinema,” no. 460 (October 1992): 67-71. Reprinted in “Clint Eastwood: Interviews.” Eds. Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999 (p. 178).
“I think what the ultra-right wing conservatives did to the Republicans is really self-destructive, absolutely stupid.”
—interview with Peter Biskind, “Any Which Way He Can,” originally published in “Premiere,” April 1993, 52-60. Reprinted in “Clint Eastwood: Interviews.” Eds. Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999 (p. 204).
“I’m not in any of those camps. I’m not in Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition and I’m not in the Republicans’ camp. I became a Republican only because when I turned twenty-one, Eisenhower was running and I wanted to vote for him, as opposed to Stevenson. So I did that. And also, the Republicans were a minority and it’s fun to part of a minority. At that time, they were outnumbered three-to-one in California. So I just became that. But actually, I would say that my views are probably leaning towards sort of a libertarian point of view.”
—interview with David Breskin, “Inner Views: Filmmakers in Conversation.” New York: Da Capo Press, 1997 (p. 390).
“I guess I was a social liberal and fiscal conservative before it became fashionable.”
—interview with Anne Thompson, “The Filmmaker Series: Clint Eastwood,” “Premiere,” March 1999, 52.
“I don’t see myself as conservative, but I’m not ultra-leftist. You build a philosophy of your own. I like the libertarian view, which is to leave everyone alone. Even as a kid, I was annoyed by people who wanted to tell everyone how to live.
[On same-sex marriage]
“From a libertarian point of view, you would say, ‘Yeah? So what?’ You have to believe in total equality. People should be allowed to be what they want to be and do what they want—as long as they’re not bothering other people.”
—interview with Dennis McCafferty, “American Icon Series: Clint Eastwood,” “USA Weekend,” January 25, 2004.
[On Korea and Vietnam]
“When I was in the Army I was against the Korean War, and I’m against the war in Vietnam.”
——circa 1969, quoted in Michael Munn, “Clint Eastwood: Hollywood’s Loner.” London: Robson Books, 1992 (p.103).
[On gun control]
“I think there should be a mandatory sentence for crimes committed with handguns. The law isn’t tough enough. My name has been on some of those lists against gun control, but it’s been done without my permission. People in those groups don’t support prosecution hard enough. There’s no way to outlaw handguns, because our society is so inundated with them; it would be impossible to stop criminals from getting them. But there shouldn’t be any plea bargaining for crimes with handguns. Maybe it’s too simple—maybe it’s too conservative, too cut and dried—but it works in other countries.”
—circa the early-to-middle 1970s, quoted in Michael Munn, “Clint Eastwood: Hollywood’s Loner.” London: Robson Books, 1992 (p.124).
[On censorship, ratings, Watergate, and his 1973 film, “Breezy”]
“I don’t think it deserves to be R-rated at all, but it is because twenty-some states in the Union have statutes that say showing the nipple on a woman’s breast is obscene.
“I understand that in Texas there was a move to give ‘Paper Moon’ an R instead of a PG because an under-aged girl is swearing and kind of pimping for a hotel clerk in one scene. You could argue that the local community has the right to set standards, but if you accept that, you could argue that the community has the right to impose segregation. That’s the long-range implication of something like the Supreme Court decisions on obscenity.
“[Censorship] can be dangerous. If the press had been censored, we’d never have found out about Watergate, which needed to be exposed. As far as films are concerned, I think adult human beings ought to be able to see what they want to. I’m too much of an individual to think otherwise.”
—circa 1973, quoted in Michael Munn, “Clint Eastwood: Hollywood’s Loner.” London: Robson Books, 1992 (p. 135).
[On Watergate and his 1973 film, “Magnum Force”]
“If nothing else, Watergate was the dumbest handled thing in the world. I’m glad it was exposed, for the sake of turning off what might have been a dangerous trend. I’d hate to think that our intelligence forces around the world were operating as clumsily as that group; leaving money in telephone booths. It was like a poor man’s James Bond movie.
“I’m sure that right now a lot of people are asking why President Nixon didn’t check further into former Vice-President Agnew’s background, or why there are so many people around him who seem to be of questionable honor. You’d have to say that he’s a very poor judge of character. And on the other side, a lot of people are wondering why Senator McGovern didn’t check out Senator Eagleton.
“‘Magnum Force’ is all about that, about what happens when the law decides it’s above the law. Pretty soon, everybody’s burglarizing. If breaking and entering are considered legal under any circumstances, I think pretty soon we’ll all just go breaking into a neighbor’s house and lift whatever we happen to want or need. Maybe information, maybe his wallet.
“There’s a reason for the rights of the accused, and I think it’s very important and one of the things that makes our system great. But there are also the rights of the victim. Most people who talk about the rights of the accused have never been victimized; most of them probably never got accosted in an alley. The symbol of justice is the scale, and yet the scale is never balanced. It falls to the left and then it swings too far back to the right. That’s the whole basis of ‘Magnum Force.’ These guys on the police force form their own elite, a tough inner group to combat what they see as opposition to law and order. It’s remotely based on that Brazilian police death squad. It’s frightening.”
—circa 1973, quoted in Michael Munn, “Clint Eastwood: Hollywood’s Loner.” London: Robson Books, 1992 (pp.137-8).
[On George McGovern, Harry Truman, and political naturalism]
“When Senator McGovern told that jerk who was harassing him to ‘Kiss my ass,’ I started thinking, ‘This guy is all of a sudden sounding good to me.’ Not because he used profanity but because he had a human reaction: he was tired of being bugged. When Harry S. Truman told off that critic who said his daughter couldn’t sing, and called him a stupid son of a bitch or whatever the hell he called him, it was the natural reaction of a father expressing resentment at somebody attacking his daughter. I think that appealed to a lot of people.”
—circa 1973, quoted in Michael Munn, “Clint Eastwood: Hollywood’s Loner.” London: Robson Books, 1992 (p.141).
[On political categorization]
“I’m a political nothing. I mean, I hate to be categorized. I’m certainly not an extremist; the best thing you can say about extremists, either right or left, is that they’re boring people. Not very flexible people. I suppose I’m a moderate, but I could be called a lot of things. On certain things I could be called very liberal; on others, very conservative.
“... I’m liberal on civil rights, conservative on Government spending.
“... The Government has to help people, to some degree, but it should be encouraging people to make something of themselves.”
—interview with Arthur Knight, “Playboy,” February 1974, p. 170, col. 1.
[On what advice he would offer Ronald Reagan]
“I could suggest some better places to go than that cemetery in Germany.”
—interview with Tim Cahill, “Clint Eastwood: The Rolling Stone Interview,” originally published in “Rolling Stone,” 4 July 1985, 8-23. Reprinted in “Clint Eastwood: Interviews,” Eds. Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999 (p.128).
[On music, race, and his adolescence]
“I think I was really a black guy in a white body.”
[On drug use and his 1988 film, “Bird”]
“I didn’t want to make a propagandistic movie about drugs. ‘Just say no’ and that kind of thing is terrific, but nobody wants to see a movie and have that jammed down their throats. Why Bird resorted to drugs and others didn’t, no one really knows. So I present it and let people make their own judgment. This is what it felt like to live with a genius.”
—quoted in Jack Kroll, “Clint Makes Bird Sing,” “Newsweek,” 31 October 1988.
[On violence in the entertainment industry, politicians’ responses to it, and the nature of the American legal system]
“Actually, I’m beginning to annoyed by politicians who suddenly start blaming television, the movies, and so forth. You can call TV too violent, or movies too violent. You could just simply blame bad television and bad movies. But when a politician get involved in this kind of diatribe, I never know whether he’s doing it to serve his country or to serve himself. When you’re looking for scapegoats, the movie and television industry make a choice target: they never fight back. Television puts up its umbrella and Hollywood beats its breast ... Janet Reno is probably trying to get herself forgiven for the enormous fiasco of Waco, which is the most violent thing I’ve seen on television lately! And I don’t know very many TV programs that display as much violence as the television newscasts.
“Recently, a man was arrested in Northern California for kidnapping and afterwards murdering a young girl. As it turned out, he had already been convicted on two occasions for the same offense! The state of Washington is considering passing a law according to which the third conviction for a major crime will condemn you to life imprisonment without possibility of parole. But how many people will have to die before this third conviction? All the values in this country have changed so much.
“I was raised with the idea that crime doesn’t pay. But the legal system has become unbelievably devious, and the average conviction for murder today is five and a half years in actual fact.”
[On the Brady Bill and gun use in America]
“I was always a backer of this bill.
“It establishes a Federally mandated waiting period of five days between the application for the purchase of a handgun and its transfer to the purchaser. In California, however, the waiting period is already fifteen days. On the other hand, almost all Swiss families with a family member in the national guard have assault weapons at home. Simply put, Swiss society doesn’t encourage people to use them. Could that be because, in our society, the guilty pass through the system so quickly that nothing is taken seriously any more?”
—interview with Henri Behar, “America on the Brink of the Void,” originally published in “Le Monde,” 16 December 1993. Reprinted in “Clint Eastwood: Interviews,” Eds. Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999 (pp. 219-20).
source:
imdb.com/name/nm000014.../nest/15014376
imdb.com/name/nm000014.../nest/15014376
Since several of you suckers seem to be deeply misinformed about Eastwood's politics, I thought that I'd quote the man himself in an effort to set the record straight.
“The only time I’ve been associated with anything political is by innuendo or by people’s assumptions that I have certain political aspects. Probably—actually—I’m the most moderate person, politically. After Watergate, I’m like everybody else—thinking, Oh Jesus, politics, keep me away from it—I’m reticent. I’ve supported Democrats and Republicans in California. It depends on what the guy stands for at the moment.”
—interview with Patrick McGilligan, “Clint Eastwood,” originally published in “Focus on Film,” no. 25 (Summer-Fall 1976): 12-20. Reprinted in “Clint Eastwood: Interviews.” Eds. Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999 (p. 36).
“I’m not pro-business. I never have been. The only person who says I am is my opponent. I want to help build bridges.”
--interview with Robert Lindsay, “As Clint Eastwood Runs for Mayor, Small-Town Race Hangs on Big Issue,” “New York Times,” March 25, 1986, A20.
"I don’t know why anybody would want to look for political ramifications in any film. After all, if you love making pictures, if you like doing the whole spectrum, no particular picture has any bearing on what you feel in you own life.
“I’ve always said, for instance, that Adolf Hitler must be a fascinating character to play in a movie. The role is probably an actor’s dream. That doesn’t mean the actor is a fascist.
“I’m just a filmmaker. ‘Bird’ does have roots in my own experience though. I was raised in Oakland, California, around this kind of music. A lot of it is out of the black experience, and I feel I know it as well as any white person around.”
“Nobody understood what I was doing at the beginning and some of them still don’t understand me now. Some people, for instance, still cling to the idea that the Dirty Harry films are some kind of right-wing statement. You can look at those pictures that way if you’re looking to pigeonhole somebody. But you can interpret them as other things too. If you want to take the time to think about it. You can certainly interpret Dirty Harry as an individual going against the system.”
—interview with Nat Hentoff, “Flight of Fancy,” originally published in “American Film,” September 1988, 24-31. Reprinted in “Clint Eastwood: Interviews.” Eds. Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999 (pp. 154, 157).
“I’ve been a Republican because I chose that party at the time of my military service at the beginning of the fifties, and I voted for Eisenhower, but I have a tendency to consider myself more of a ‘free thinker.’ My political choices don’t really fit in with any of the camps, and actually I feel myself to be something of a libertarian, in the sense that I think you have to let people live in peace, respect individual freedoms.”
—interview with Thierry Jousse and Camille Nevers, “Clint Eastwood,” originally published in “Cahiers du cinema,” no. 460 (October 1992): 67-71. Reprinted in “Clint Eastwood: Interviews.” Eds. Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999 (p. 178).
“I think what the ultra-right wing conservatives did to the Republicans is really self-destructive, absolutely stupid.”
—interview with Peter Biskind, “Any Which Way He Can,” originally published in “Premiere,” April 1993, 52-60. Reprinted in “Clint Eastwood: Interviews.” Eds. Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999 (p. 204).
“I’m not in any of those camps. I’m not in Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition and I’m not in the Republicans’ camp. I became a Republican only because when I turned twenty-one, Eisenhower was running and I wanted to vote for him, as opposed to Stevenson. So I did that. And also, the Republicans were a minority and it’s fun to part of a minority. At that time, they were outnumbered three-to-one in California. So I just became that. But actually, I would say that my views are probably leaning towards sort of a libertarian point of view.”
—interview with David Breskin, “Inner Views: Filmmakers in Conversation.” New York: Da Capo Press, 1997 (p. 390).
“I guess I was a social liberal and fiscal conservative before it became fashionable.”
—interview with Anne Thompson, “The Filmmaker Series: Clint Eastwood,” “Premiere,” March 1999, 52.
“I don’t see myself as conservative, but I’m not ultra-leftist. You build a philosophy of your own. I like the libertarian view, which is to leave everyone alone. Even as a kid, I was annoyed by people who wanted to tell everyone how to live.
[On same-sex marriage]
“From a libertarian point of view, you would say, ‘Yeah? So what?’ You have to believe in total equality. People should be allowed to be what they want to be and do what they want—as long as they’re not bothering other people.”
—interview with Dennis McCafferty, “American Icon Series: Clint Eastwood,” “USA Weekend,” January 25, 2004.
[On Korea and Vietnam]
“When I was in the Army I was against the Korean War, and I’m against the war in Vietnam.”
——circa 1969, quoted in Michael Munn, “Clint Eastwood: Hollywood’s Loner.” London: Robson Books, 1992 (p.103).
[On gun control]
“I think there should be a mandatory sentence for crimes committed with handguns. The law isn’t tough enough. My name has been on some of those lists against gun control, but it’s been done without my permission. People in those groups don’t support prosecution hard enough. There’s no way to outlaw handguns, because our society is so inundated with them; it would be impossible to stop criminals from getting them. But there shouldn’t be any plea bargaining for crimes with handguns. Maybe it’s too simple—maybe it’s too conservative, too cut and dried—but it works in other countries.”
—circa the early-to-middle 1970s, quoted in Michael Munn, “Clint Eastwood: Hollywood’s Loner.” London: Robson Books, 1992 (p.124).
[On censorship, ratings, Watergate, and his 1973 film, “Breezy”]
“I don’t think it deserves to be R-rated at all, but it is because twenty-some states in the Union have statutes that say showing the nipple on a woman’s breast is obscene.
“I understand that in Texas there was a move to give ‘Paper Moon’ an R instead of a PG because an under-aged girl is swearing and kind of pimping for a hotel clerk in one scene. You could argue that the local community has the right to set standards, but if you accept that, you could argue that the community has the right to impose segregation. That’s the long-range implication of something like the Supreme Court decisions on obscenity.
“[Censorship] can be dangerous. If the press had been censored, we’d never have found out about Watergate, which needed to be exposed. As far as films are concerned, I think adult human beings ought to be able to see what they want to. I’m too much of an individual to think otherwise.”
—circa 1973, quoted in Michael Munn, “Clint Eastwood: Hollywood’s Loner.” London: Robson Books, 1992 (p. 135).
[On Watergate and his 1973 film, “Magnum Force”]
“If nothing else, Watergate was the dumbest handled thing in the world. I’m glad it was exposed, for the sake of turning off what might have been a dangerous trend. I’d hate to think that our intelligence forces around the world were operating as clumsily as that group; leaving money in telephone booths. It was like a poor man’s James Bond movie.
“I’m sure that right now a lot of people are asking why President Nixon didn’t check further into former Vice-President Agnew’s background, or why there are so many people around him who seem to be of questionable honor. You’d have to say that he’s a very poor judge of character. And on the other side, a lot of people are wondering why Senator McGovern didn’t check out Senator Eagleton.
“‘Magnum Force’ is all about that, about what happens when the law decides it’s above the law. Pretty soon, everybody’s burglarizing. If breaking and entering are considered legal under any circumstances, I think pretty soon we’ll all just go breaking into a neighbor’s house and lift whatever we happen to want or need. Maybe information, maybe his wallet.
“There’s a reason for the rights of the accused, and I think it’s very important and one of the things that makes our system great. But there are also the rights of the victim. Most people who talk about the rights of the accused have never been victimized; most of them probably never got accosted in an alley. The symbol of justice is the scale, and yet the scale is never balanced. It falls to the left and then it swings too far back to the right. That’s the whole basis of ‘Magnum Force.’ These guys on the police force form their own elite, a tough inner group to combat what they see as opposition to law and order. It’s remotely based on that Brazilian police death squad. It’s frightening.”
—circa 1973, quoted in Michael Munn, “Clint Eastwood: Hollywood’s Loner.” London: Robson Books, 1992 (pp.137-8).
[On George McGovern, Harry Truman, and political naturalism]
“When Senator McGovern told that jerk who was harassing him to ‘Kiss my ass,’ I started thinking, ‘This guy is all of a sudden sounding good to me.’ Not because he used profanity but because he had a human reaction: he was tired of being bugged. When Harry S. Truman told off that critic who said his daughter couldn’t sing, and called him a stupid son of a bitch or whatever the hell he called him, it was the natural reaction of a father expressing resentment at somebody attacking his daughter. I think that appealed to a lot of people.”
—circa 1973, quoted in Michael Munn, “Clint Eastwood: Hollywood’s Loner.” London: Robson Books, 1992 (p.141).
[On political categorization]
“I’m a political nothing. I mean, I hate to be categorized. I’m certainly not an extremist; the best thing you can say about extremists, either right or left, is that they’re boring people. Not very flexible people. I suppose I’m a moderate, but I could be called a lot of things. On certain things I could be called very liberal; on others, very conservative.
“... I’m liberal on civil rights, conservative on Government spending.
“... The Government has to help people, to some degree, but it should be encouraging people to make something of themselves.”
—interview with Arthur Knight, “Playboy,” February 1974, p. 170, col. 1.
[On what advice he would offer Ronald Reagan]
“I could suggest some better places to go than that cemetery in Germany.”
—interview with Tim Cahill, “Clint Eastwood: The Rolling Stone Interview,” originally published in “Rolling Stone,” 4 July 1985, 8-23. Reprinted in “Clint Eastwood: Interviews,” Eds. Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999 (p.128).
[On music, race, and his adolescence]
“I think I was really a black guy in a white body.”
[On drug use and his 1988 film, “Bird”]
“I didn’t want to make a propagandistic movie about drugs. ‘Just say no’ and that kind of thing is terrific, but nobody wants to see a movie and have that jammed down their throats. Why Bird resorted to drugs and others didn’t, no one really knows. So I present it and let people make their own judgment. This is what it felt like to live with a genius.”
—quoted in Jack Kroll, “Clint Makes Bird Sing,” “Newsweek,” 31 October 1988.
[On violence in the entertainment industry, politicians’ responses to it, and the nature of the American legal system]
“Actually, I’m beginning to annoyed by politicians who suddenly start blaming television, the movies, and so forth. You can call TV too violent, or movies too violent. You could just simply blame bad television and bad movies. But when a politician get involved in this kind of diatribe, I never know whether he’s doing it to serve his country or to serve himself. When you’re looking for scapegoats, the movie and television industry make a choice target: they never fight back. Television puts up its umbrella and Hollywood beats its breast ... Janet Reno is probably trying to get herself forgiven for the enormous fiasco of Waco, which is the most violent thing I’ve seen on television lately! And I don’t know very many TV programs that display as much violence as the television newscasts.
“Recently, a man was arrested in Northern California for kidnapping and afterwards murdering a young girl. As it turned out, he had already been convicted on two occasions for the same offense! The state of Washington is considering passing a law according to which the third conviction for a major crime will condemn you to life imprisonment without possibility of parole. But how many people will have to die before this third conviction? All the values in this country have changed so much.
“I was raised with the idea that crime doesn’t pay. But the legal system has become unbelievably devious, and the average conviction for murder today is five and a half years in actual fact.”
[On the Brady Bill and gun use in America]
“I was always a backer of this bill.
“It establishes a Federally mandated waiting period of five days between the application for the purchase of a handgun and its transfer to the purchaser. In California, however, the waiting period is already fifteen days. On the other hand, almost all Swiss families with a family member in the national guard have assault weapons at home. Simply put, Swiss society doesn’t encourage people to use them. Could that be because, in our society, the guilty pass through the system so quickly that nothing is taken seriously any more?”
—interview with Henri Behar, “America on the Brink of the Void,” originally published in “Le Monde,” 16 December 1993. Reprinted in “Clint Eastwood: Interviews,” Eds. Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999 (pp. 219-20).
source:
imdb.com/name/nm000014.../nest/15014376
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