Top 200 Jack Nicholson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You make me want to be a better man.”

— Jack Nicholson

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2. “I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.”

— Jack Nicholson

3. “The only way to break a bad habit was to replace it with a better habit.”

— Jack Nicholson

4. “Have you ever danced with the Devil in the pale moonlight?”

— Jack Nicholson

5. “You can’t handle the truth!”

— Jack Nicholson

6. “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth.”

— Jack Nicholson

7. “We live, we die, and the wheels on the bus go round and round.”

— Jack Nicholson

8. “When you look at life retrospectively you rarely regret anything that you did, but you might regret things that you didn’t do.”

— Jack Nicholson

9. “The minute that you’re not learning I believe you’re dead.”

— Jack Nicholson

10. “I have given a name to my pain, and it is Batman.”

— Jack Nicholson

11. “If you want your freedom, you have to be willing to work hard to exercise it.”

— Jack Nicholson

12. “I usually don’t get too bogged down with my personal problems because that’s a one-way street if you get yourself into a negative frame of mind and only see the dark side of life.”

— Jack Nicholson

13. “I eat breakfast 300 yards from 4000 Cubans, who are trained to kill me, so don’t think for one second that you can come down here, flash your badge and make me nervous.”

— Jack Nicholson

14. “I have never lied to you, I have always told you some version of the truth.”

— Jack Nicholson

15. “My motto is: more good times.”

— Jack Nicholson

16. “Women – a mistake, or did He do it to us on purpose?”

— Jack Nicholson

17. “This town needs an enema!”

— Jack Nicholson

18. “Human beings are always going to find interesting ways of making a mess of their lives. It’s human nature.”

— Jack Nicholson

19. “Well, a girlfriend once told me never to fight with anybody you don’t love.”

— Jack Nicholson

20. “I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability.”

— Jack Nicholson

21. “Take caution in your tone, commander. I’m a fair man, but this – heat is making me absolutely crazy.”

— Jack Nicholson

22. “I don’t believe that relationships are fixed things. People are necessarily complex and confused beings. We don’t always do the right thing, say the right, and behave the same way or the way we always want to behave.”

— Jack Nicholson

23. “When we make mistakes they call it evil. When God makes mistakes they call it Nature!”

— Jack Nicholson

24. “And this, incidentally, is my thumbnail sketch of American marriage: A woman sees a man; she likes him. Now she jumps on this thing and rides it to some kind of standstill. Then she changes it and trains it, and to the exact degree that she’s able to do this, she disrespects him.”

— Jack Nicholson

25. “I’ll tell you one thing: Don’t ever give anybody your best advice, because they’re not going to follow it.”

— Jack Nicholson

26. “In the real world there’s an after-effect of disappointment if you lose an argument. But if, to begin with, you’re set up not to have this particular autonomy, then you’re not disappointed.”

— Jack Nicholson

27. “I’m not a power person. I like everyone to be on an equal footing.”

— Jack Nicholson

28. “Son, we live in a world that has walls and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You!?”

— Jack Nicholson

29. “You look at someone long enough, you discover their humanity.”

— Jack Nicholson

30. “Never rub another man’s rhubarb.”

— Jack Nicholson

31. “I love discourse. I’m dying to have my mind changed. I’m probably the only liberal who read Treason, by Ann Coulter. I want to know, you understand? I like listening to everybody. This to me is the elixir of life.”

— Jack Nicholson

32. “Just because you’re perfectionist doesn’t mean you’re perfect.”

— Jack Nicholson

33. “I’d prefer if people had no impressions of me. As a kid, I had to tell my own family, “Please, just don’t talk about me!” Because they always got it wrong. Always. I just didn’t want them to tell anyone anything about me.”

— Jack Nicholson

34. “It’s very easy to go down, so always live up. Incline yourself upward.”

— Jack Nicholson

35. “Beer, it’s the best damn drink in the world.”

— Jack Nicholson

36. “Just let the wardrobe do the acting.”

— Jack Nicholson

37. “Decent people shouldn’t live here. They’d be happier some place else.”

— Jack Nicholson

38. “Do you think God knew what he was doing when he created woman?”

— Jack Nicholson

39. “For a long time, I was afraid to be alone. I had to learn how to be alone. And there are still times when I think, Uh-oh! I gotta talk to somebody here or I’m gonna go crazy! But I like to be alone. Now I do. I really do. There’s a big luxury in solitude.”

— Jack Nicholson

40. “With my sunglasses on, I’m Jack Nicholson. Without them, I’m fat and 60.”

— Jack Nicholson

41. “You can call me Joker. And as you can see, I’m a lot happier.”

— Jack Nicholson

42. “Charlize Theron and Cate Blanchett are very good actresses.”

— Jack Nicholson

43. “I’m certainly not as tough as people think. I’m not a fighter and so forth. I’d just as soon go home.”

— Jack Nicholson

44. “Children give your life a resonance that it can’t have without them.”

— Jack Nicholson

45. “I feel very lucky because I don’t think there’s any part I can’t play. There are parts that scare me more than others...”

— Jack Nicholson

46. “I am in an age group where it is rude to discuss money, and now it is all anyone cares about.”

— Jack Nicholson

47. “There’s no point dwelling on what might or could have been. You just have to go forward.”

— Jack Nicholson

48. “I don’t know if this is a true statistic, but I heard somewhere that there are three times as many single women over forty as single men. That’s what we got from the women’s movement. The chickens have come home to roost.”

— Jack Nicholson

49. “I think the Greeks invented sports as an antidote to philosophy.”

— Jack Nicholson

50. “I think the Greeks invented sports as an antidote to philosophy. In sports there are absolute rules. It’s not, What about this? What about that? Either you’re safe or you’re out. It’s ten yards or it’s not. It’s in the hoop or out of the hoop. It’s certain.”

— Jack Nicholson