Top 35 Graham Moore Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people. – STEVE JOBS.”

— Graham Moore

2. “Poor people all think they deserve to be rich,” he continued. “Rich people live every day with the uneasy knowledge that we do not.”

— Graham Moore

3. “The adversarial system,” that’s what it was called. The attorneys on each side did their best to win, no-holds-barred – and whatever emerged from the mess of broken limbs was called justice.”

— Graham Moore

4. “Refraction, he called it. The way light is broken up into component colors when it passes through a prism. I felt like a refraction of a person. So many different shades that layer to create the illusion of a solid thing.”

— Graham Moore

5. “Knowing the difference between right and wrong sometimes did not serve to clarify much of anything. Just because a man is able to draw his line in the sand, it doesn’t mean he’ll know what to do when his only course of action requires crossing it.”

— Graham Moore

6. “Paul had always wanted to be a prodigy. But what no one ever told him was that prodigies don’t feel like prodigies; they feel old. They feel like has-beens just at the moment that they’re said to be blossoming.”

— Graham Moore

7. “His genius was not in inventing; rather, it was in inventing a system of invention.”

— Graham Moore

8. “What an imprecise science was medicine. It was more an art than was fiction.”

— Graham Moore

9. “I believe it is worthwhile trying to discover more about the world, even if this only teaches us how little we know.”

— Graham Moore

10. “The United States was of an anti-intellectual bent. And yet the two most technologically advanced laboratories in the world, as far as Paul could tell, were no longer in Paris’s Louvre or London’s Burlington House. They were now in Menlo Park, New Jersey, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They were operated by two self-made men with no formal training at all.”

— Graham Moore

11. “Westinghouse was responsible for tremendous feats of manufacturing – extremely well-built devices made by a factory of hundreds, each one supplying a part. A chain of construction. Edison, on the other hand, had built himself a factory that did not produce machines, but rather ideas.”

— Graham Moore

12. “But this is the very thing about electricity. Nothing about it makes any common sense at all.”

— Graham Moore

13. “One doesn’t lie down with a lion and get to act surprised if one finds oneself devoured.”

— Graham Moore

14. “Arthur looked deeply into the boy’s clear blue eyes and scanned the contours of his handsome face. Arthur could hear something, faintly, in the distance. A rushing sound. A crash of water against rock. He wasn’t sure if it was real or not, but he heard it all the same. Torrents of water rushing over a cliff. He tuned his ears to the noise and recognized the tone. He steadied his hand and listened to the sound, from the back of his mind, of the Reichenbach Falls.”

— Graham Moore

15. “Sometimes I hate it so much,” she said. “Always having to pretend.” Paul gripped her fingers tighter. “This is America,” he said. “We’re all pretending.”

— Graham Moore

16. “It takes a shock to the system, doesn’t it, to make a man realize what good things he has.”

— Graham Moore

17. “Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: There will always be some who misunderstand you. –.”

— Graham Moore

18. “Women now seek to involve themselves in the life of their government because their government has involved itself in their lives!”

— Graham Moore

19. “Arthur had never challenged a man to a duel, but in this moment he understood the magnificent reasonableness of the tradition. It was either that or slugging him outright this very second, which didn’t seem nearly so gentlemanly.”

— Graham Moore

20. “Art is a social object, books and films and records and television shows, they’re social objects that bring people together in conversation. I love the notion that I could write something that two people could share. That’s the goal.”

— Graham Moore

21. “Where the first America was brilliant, the second was ingenious. What.”

— Graham Moore

22. “Paranoid theorizing was too easy, too emotionally satisfying.”

— Graham Moore

23. “The moment you stop bargaining is the last in which you’re ever given a thing.”

— Graham Moore

24. “There is an undeniable exhilaration in moment of even the smallest discovery.”

— Graham Moore

25. “Bankers all wanted to be princes. Professors all wanted to be Martin Luther.”

— Graham Moore

26. “Light bulbs. Electricity. It seems likely that ours will be the last generation to ever gaze, wide-eyed, at something truly novel. That our kind will be the last to ever stare in disbelief at a man-made thing that could not possibly exist. We made wonders, boys. I only wonder how many of them are left to make.”

— Graham Moore

27. “Even a true story is a fiction, Paul knew. It is the comforting tool we use to organize the chaotic world around us into something comprehensible. It is the cognitive machine that separates the wheat of emotion from the chaff of sensation.”

— Graham Moore

28. “Thomas Edison was not, Paul thought, the first man to become rich by inventing something clever. Rather, he was the first man to build a factory for harnessing cleverness.”

— Graham Moore

29. “Some writing one had to do in the dark.”

— Graham Moore

30. “General Electric.′ It has a rather nice ring to it, doesn’t it?”

— Graham Moore

31. “No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude. – KARL POPPER A.”

— Graham Moore

32. “It was not the job of a litigator to determine facts; it was his job to construct a story from those facts by which a clear moral conclusion would be unavoidable.”

— Graham Moore

33. “Why, of course, if the reader were smart enough, he could figure the whole thing through after just the first few pages! But in his heart Arthur knew that his readers didn’t really want to win. They wanted to test their wits against the author at full pitch, and they wanted to lose. To be dazzled.”

— Graham Moore

34. “What she missed the most about the person she’d been, Maya realized, was her hope for a coming world that turned out never to have been possible. She was nostalgic for an imaginary future.”

— Graham Moore

35. “Inept lying was almost as good as honesty.”

— Graham Moore

36. “In the stories, there’s always an answer at the end. Resolution. The detective confronts the killer; the killer admits it. We know for sure. But out here – it’s not like that. Out here, maybe somebody goes to jail. Maybe somebody doesn’t. But we never know the truth. The real, whole, definite truth. It’s impossible.”

— Graham Moore

37. “What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what is going on. – JACQUES COUSTEAU.”

— Graham Moore

38. “And yet as pristine as she appeared, her demeanor was not delicate. She was no porcelain doll. She was a distant glacier. Remote, quiet, and yet possessed of great and unknowable activity beneath the surface.”

— Graham Moore

39. “The genius of each of these men was not in the labors of his own hands, it was in the efficiency of the system he had built.”

— Graham Moore