Top 90 Dalton Trumbo Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The sun in its slow descent filtered great cathedral-moats of gold through latticed boughs of pine and birch and maple. It was that time of day- or afternoon- when the forest’s breath, sun-stunned, yearning for night, impalpably swoons to the slow pulsations of blood and time and silence.”

— Dalton Trumbo

52. “If there could be a next time and somebody said let’s fight for liberty he would say mister my life is important. I’m not a fool and when I swap my life for liberty I’ve got to know in advance what liberty is and whose idea of liberty we’re talking about and just how much of that liberty we’re going to have.”

— Dalton Trumbo

53. “No matter how far you are separated from other people if you have an idea of time why then you are in the same world with them you are part of them but if you lose time the others go on ahead of you and you are left alone hanging in air lost to everything forever.”

— Dalton Trumbo

54. “But whose idea of decency? And decency for who? Speak up and tell us what decency is. Tell us how much better a decent dead man feels than an indecent live one.”

— Dalton Trumbo

55. “As that great patriot Patrick Henry said” Johnny get your gun get your gun get your gun.”

— Dalton Trumbo

56. “Come back Kareen you’ll choke you’ll fill up like I’m filling up. You’ll go down Kareen watch out please watch out. Come back Kareen. You’re gone. You weren’t even there.”

— Dalton Trumbo

57. “The worst criminals on earth are those who toy with love.”

— Dalton Trumbo

58. “Nobody but the dead know whether all these things people talk about are worth dying for or not.”

— Dalton Trumbo

59. “Maybe it was just as well he was eating through a tube that English coffee was so stinking bad. Roast beef and pudding and soggy pastries and bad coffee. It was just as well.”

— Dalton Trumbo

60. “The airplane said Mr. Hargraves would cut down the distance between nations and peoples. The airplane would be a great instrument in making people understand one another in making people love one another. The airplane said Mr. Hargraves was ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity and mutual understanding. Everyone would be friends said Mr. Hargraves when the airplane knitted the world together so that the people of the world understood each other.”

— Dalton Trumbo

61. “He used to tell himself although he knew it wasn’t true that the air around her house was different because it was near to her.”

— Dalton Trumbo

62. “Telephones ringing at night are important.”

— Dalton Trumbo

63. “People said he was a dope fiend and that sometime he would get dangerous. But he never did and he made the best hamburgers anyone ever ate.”

— Dalton Trumbo

64. “But he could believe anything from now on out. A million to one ten million to one there was always the one.”

— Dalton Trumbo

65. “It was like sitting in a silent room waiting for someone very important someone for whom you have been waiting a long while and then suddenly hearing a knock on the door. For just a minute you hesitate wondering who it might be and what does he want and why did he come. For just a second you’re scared because although you’ve waited for years you really never expected the knock.”

— Dalton Trumbo

66. “The important thing is that Mr. Simmons he receives the flowers. Flowers are beautiful. Mister Simmons is a gentleman and he will enjoy them. That he should know where they came from that is quite beside the point. I know that I have expressed my gratitude with something beautiful. I know that I have tried to repay him for the splendid things he has done for me. It is not important that Mr. Simmons he should know it. It is only important that he should receive the roses yes?”

— Dalton Trumbo

67. “They died crying in their minds like little babies. They forgot the thing they were fighting for the thing they were dying for. They thought about things a man can understand. They died yearning for the face of a friend. They died whimpering for the voice of a mother a father a wife a child. They died with their hearts sick for one more look at the place where they were born please god just one more look.”

— Dalton Trumbo

68. “The Library of Congress reports that the Army Office of the Surgeon General for Medical Statistics “does not have figures on single or multiple amputees.” Either the government doesn’t think them important, or, in the words of a researcher for one of the national television networks, “the military itself, while sure of how many tons of bombs it has dropped, is unsure of how many legs and arms its men have lost.”

— Dalton Trumbo

69. “You plan the wars you masters of men plan the wars and point the way and we will point the gun.”

— Dalton Trumbo

70. “America I love you you’re like a sweetheart to me.”

— Dalton Trumbo

71. “He too had been taken away from his home. He too had been put into the service of another without his consent. He too had been sent to a foreign country far from his native parts. He too had been forced to fight against other slaves of his own kind in a strange place.”

— Dalton Trumbo

72. “Death is sleep without knowledge of the pleasure of life.”

— Dalton Trumbo

73. “This night they sang in the town of Bethlehem there is born a little baby who shall be the saviour of the world. He is the prince of peace and the son of god and his name is Jesus. Peace on earth and good will toward men. Rejoice everyone and sing with the angels for this night a saviour is born. Peace peace peace on earth and good will toward men.”

— Dalton Trumbo

74. “Nobody but the dead know whether all these things people talk about are worth dying for or not. And the dead can’t talk. So the words about noble deaths and sacred blood and honor and such are all put into dead lips by grave robbers and fakes who have no right to speak for the dead.”

— Dalton Trumbo

75. “The child tortures the fly because he has the power to do so, and had not yet learned how mercifully to kill.”

— Dalton Trumbo

76. “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?”

— Dalton Trumbo

77. “He couldn’t see her face of course but he knew she was smiling.”

— Dalton Trumbo

78. “How does a bird feel when it dies? A fish, a bug... the infinite worm? I think it weeps.”

— Dalton Trumbo

79. “Thank you mister. You fight for liberty. Me I don’t care for some.”

— Dalton Trumbo

80. “These bullies must keep up the assault, the slander, the character assassinations, stirring up the emotions of the public to a fever pitch, acting like saviors when in actuality they are frauds, phony patriots and very evil men in disguise, wrapping themselves in the flag.”

— Dalton Trumbo

81. “Please all you guys who want to fight to preserve our honor let us know what the hell honor is. Is it American honor for the whole world we’re fighting for? Maybe the world doesn’t like it. Maybe the South Sea Islanders like their honor better.”

— Dalton Trumbo

82. “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.”

— Dalton Trumbo

83. “He could want it to be a dream forever and that wouldn’t change things.”

— Dalton Trumbo

84. “But he would like to feel that he was breathing the same air she breathed that he was in the same country she was in.”

— Dalton Trumbo

85. “Hmmmm. But what do the dead say? Did.”

— Dalton Trumbo

86. “I jump to my feet in this dream within a dream. Although I am quite dry, I discover that the trees of the forest in which I have slept stand rooted in water. Beyond them, at the forest’s edge, stretches a tarn. From the steely face of the tarn rises a mist, and there, where the mist swirls thickest, shimmering like a pale column risen from its depths, dripping tarn water and rotted rose petals, stands Gunther.”

— Dalton Trumbo

87. “Vergissen jullie je daarin niet wij zullen leven. Wij zullen leven en wandelen en praten en eten en zingen en lachen en voelen en beminnen en onze kinderen dragen in rust in veiligheid in fatsoen in vrede beramen jullie de oorlogen maar jullie meesters van de mensheid beramen jullie de oorlogen en wijs de weg en dan zullen wij de geweren richten.”

— Dalton Trumbo

88. “He knew now that he had never been really happy in his whole life. There had been times when he had thought he was happy but none of them were like this.”

— Dalton Trumbo

89. “That was the trouble with numbers. They got so big you couldn’t handle them and even if you could they got you nowhere.”

— Dalton Trumbo

90. “Pay no attention when they tap you on the shoulder and say come along we’ve got to fight for liberty or whatever their word is there’s always a word.”

— Dalton Trumbo

91. “It was hard to understand how his father could be such a big failure when you stopped to think about the thing. He was a good man and an honest man. He kept his children together and they ate good food fine food rich food better food than people ate in the cities.”

— Dalton Trumbo

92. “We are immortal we are the sources of life we are the lowly despicable ugly people we are the great wonderful beautiful people of the world and we are sick of it we are utterly weary we are done with it forever and ever because we are the living and we will not be destroyed.”

— Dalton Trumbo

93. “I’ve let it remain as it was to see what it is.”

— Dalton Trumbo

94. “In fact he thought the only intelligent thing for a young man without money to do was to marry a young lady who had money.”

— Dalton Trumbo

95. “I want to be there to remind them I haven’t got a tongue to stick into the cheek I haven’t got either.”

— Dalton Trumbo

96. “And what kind of liberty were they fighting for anyway? How much liberty and whose idea of liberty? Were they fighting for the liberty of eating free ice cream cones all their lives or for the liberty of robbing anybody they pleased whenever they wanted to or what? You tell a man he can’t rob and you take away some of his liberty. You’ve got to. What the hell does liberty mean anyhow?”

— Dalton Trumbo