Top 35 Humphrey Bogart Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind.”

— Humphrey Bogart

2. “Things are never so bad they can’t be made worse.”

— Humphrey Bogart

3. “The only thing money is good for is to buy your freedom.”

— Humphrey Bogart

4. “I gave up drinking once – it was the worst afternoon of my entire life.”

— Humphrey Bogart

5. “Rick: Here’s looking at you, kid.”

— Humphrey Bogart

6. “I let my drinking do the talking.”

— Humphrey Bogart

7. “Physically, I’m not tough. I may think tough. I would say I’m kinda tough and calloused inside. I could use a foot more in height and fifty more pounds and fifteen years off my age and then God help all you bastards.”

— Humphrey Bogart

8. “Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains!”

— Humphrey Bogart

9. “The only good reason to have money is this: so that you can tell any SOB in the world to go to hell.”

— Humphrey Bogart

10. “I stick my neck out for nobody.”

— Humphrey Bogart

11. “I always cry at weddings, especially my own.”

— Humphrey Bogart

12. “Ugarte: You despise me, don’t you? Rick Blaine: If I gave you any thought I probably would.”

— Humphrey Bogart

13. “Capt. Renault: What on Earth brought you to Casablanca? Rick Blaine: My health, I came to Casablanca for the waters. Capt. Renault: The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert! Rick Blaine: I was misinformed.”

— Humphrey Bogart

14. “I hate funerals. They aren’t for the guy who’s dead. They’re for the guys who are left alive and enjoy mourning.”

— Humphrey Bogart

15. “The only way to find the best actor would be to let everybody play Hamlet and let the best man win.”

— Humphrey Bogart

16. “I don’t approve of the John Waynes and the Gary Coopers saying “Shucks, I ain’t no actor – I’m just a bridge builder or a gas station attendant.” If they aren’t actors, what the hell are they getting paid for? I have respect for my profession. I worked hard at it.”

— Humphrey Bogart

17. “You’re not a star until they can spell your name in Karachi.”

— Humphrey Bogart

18. “There are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn’t advise you to try to invade.”

— Humphrey Bogart

19. “There is more to talking than just words.”

— Humphrey Bogart

20. “Unless you really understand the water, and understand the reason for being on it, and understand the love of sailing and the feeling of quietness and solitude, you don’t really belong on a boat anyway. I think Hemingway said one time that the sea is the last free place on earth.”

— Humphrey Bogart

21. “An actor needs something to stabilize his personality, something to nail down what he really is, not what he is currently pretending to be.”

— Humphrey Bogart

22. “Sinatra’s idea of paradise is a place where there are plenty of women and no newspapermen. He doesn’t know it, but he’d be better off if it were the other way around.”

— Humphrey Bogart

23. “I’m not good-looking. I used to be, but not anymore. Not like Robert Taylor. What I have got is I have character in my face. It’s taken an awful lot of late nights and drinking to put it there. When I go to work in a picture, I say, ‘Don’t take the lines out of my face. Leave them there.’”

— Humphrey Bogart

24. “A hotdog at the ballgame beats roast beef at the Ritz.”

— Humphrey Bogart

25. “Everybody has something to conceal.”

— Humphrey Bogart

26. “If a face like Ingrid Bergman’s looks at you as though you’re adorable, everybody does. You don’t have to act very much.”

— Humphrey Bogart

27. “On the House Un-American Activities Committee: They’ll nail anyone who ever scratched his ass during the National Anthem.”

— Humphrey Bogart

28. “There never seems to be any trouble brewing around a bar until a woman puts that high heel over the brass rail. Don’t ask me why, but somehow women at bars seem to create trouble among men.”

— Humphrey Bogart

29. “All you owe the public is a good performance.”

— Humphrey Bogart

30. “Errol Flynn and I are the only ones left who do any good old hell raising.”

— Humphrey Bogart

31. “Acting is experience with something sweet behind it.”

— Humphrey Bogart

32. “I made more lousy pictures than any actor in history.”

— Humphrey Bogart

33. “People who don’t drink are afraid of revealing themselves.”

— Humphrey Bogart

34. “I don’t hurt the industry. The industry hurts itself, by making so many lousy movies – as if General Motors deliberately put out a bad car.”

— Humphrey Bogart

35. “Ah, nuts. I’m an actor. I just do what comes naturally.”

— Humphrey Bogart

36. “It is at least worth arguing that there is a modicum of the creative novelist in all of us, and that this absorption with how men get out of difficulties, single-handedly and alone if possible, is the stuff of which we weave the warp and woof of our own better dramatic imaginings.”

— Humphrey Bogart

37. “Ain’t nothing a man can’t do if he believes in himself.”

— Humphrey Bogart

38. “The only reason to make a million dollars in this business is to tell some fat producer to go to hell.”

— Humphrey Bogart

39. “Awards are meaningless for actors, unless they all play the same part.”

— Humphrey Bogart