Top 70 Marlon Brando Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Only the one who walks his own way can’t be overtaken.”

— Marlon Brando

2. “Never surrender to the momentum of mediocrity.”

— Marlon Brando

Featured in: Momentum Quotes

3. “Regret is useless in life. It’s in the past. All we have is now.”

— Marlon Brando

4. “I refused to be a fool dancing on a string held by all of those big shots. I don’t apologise, that’s my life.”

— Marlon Brando

5. “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

— Marlon Brando

6. “All I want to be is normally insane.”

— Marlon Brando

7. “Hey, you wanna hear my philosophy of life? Do it to him before he does it to you.”

— Marlon Brando

8. “Never confuse the size of your paycheck with the size of your talent.”

— Marlon Brando

9. “Mafia is the best example of capitalism we have.”

— Marlon Brando

10. “I thank you for not snoring.”

— Marlon Brando

11. “Every time you get knocked down you get up stronger.”

— Marlon Brando

12. “I had to read Wuthering Heights for English and I never enjoyed a book in all my life as much as that one.”

— Marlon Brando

13. “The military mind has one aim, and that is to make soldiers react as mechanically as possible. They want the same predictability in a man as they do in a telephone or a machine gun, and they train their soldiers to act as a unit, not as individuals.”

— Marlon Brando

14. “I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That’s my dream. That’s my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor and surviving.”

— Marlon Brando

15. “Privacy is not something that I’m merely entitled to, it’s an absolute prerequisite.”

— Marlon Brando

16. “I don’t think I was constructed to be monogamous. I don’t think it’s the nature of any man to be monogamous. Men are propelled by genetically ordained impulses over which they have no control to distribute their seed into as many females as possible.”

— Marlon Brando

17. “Acting, in general, is something most people think they’re incapable of, but they do it from morning to night. The subtlest acting I’ve ever seen is by ordinary people trying to show they feel something they don’t, or trying to hide something. It’s something everyone learns at an early age.”

— Marlon Brando

18. “Do you spend time with your family? Good. Because a man that doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.”

— Marlon Brando

19. “Most of the successful people in Hollywood are failures as human beings.”

— Marlon Brando

20. “The Jews control Hollywood and use it to promote their own agenda.”

— Marlon Brando

21. “Hollywood is run by Jews, it is owned by Jews...”

— Marlon Brando

22. “The more sensitive you are, the more certain you are to be brutalized, develop scabs, never evolve. Never allow yourself to feel anything, because you always feel to much.”

— Marlon Brando

23. “Acting is the least mysterious of all crafts. Whenever we want something from somebody or when we want to hide something or pretend, we’re acting. Most people do it all day long.”

— Marlon Brando

24. “Would people applaud me if I was a good plumber?”

— Marlon Brando

25. “Too much success can ruin you as surely as too much failure.”

— Marlon Brando

26. “Acting is an empty and usless profession.”

— Marlon Brando

27. “In a close-up, the audience is only inches away, and your face becomes the stage.”

— Marlon Brando

28. “Ask most kids about details about Auschwitz or about how the American Indians were assassinated as a people and they don’t know anything about it. They don’t want to know anything. Most people just want their beer or their soap opera or their lullaby.”

— Marlon Brando

29. “It really don’t matter what you’re thinking about, as long as you’re thinking about something.”

— Marlon Brando

30. “The close-up says everything.”

— Marlon Brando

31. “I value each woman for what she has to offer whether it be charm-beauty-wit-intelligence or humor but warmth is the quality I value most.”

— Marlon Brando

32. “We don’t go anywhere. Going somewhere is for squares. We just go!”

— Marlon Brando

33. “The most repulsive thing you could ever imagine is the inside of a camel’s mouth. That and watching a girl eat octopus or squid.”

— Marlon Brando

34. “I think awards in this country at this time are inappropriate to be received or given until the condition of the American Indian is drastically altered. If we are not our brother’s keeper, at least let us not be his executioner.”

— Marlon Brando

35. “George Bernard Shaw said that thinking was the greatest of all human endeavors, but I would say that feeling was. Allowing yourself to feel things, to feel love or wrath, hatred, rage.”

— Marlon Brando

36. “We make up any excuse to preserve myths about people we love, but the reverse is also true; if we dislike an individual we adamantly resist changing our opinion, even when somebody offers proof of his decency, because it’s vital to have myths about both the gods and devils in our lives.”

— Marlon Brando

37. “Most writers write haphazardly. The actor is fighting unjustified words all the time.”

— Marlon Brando

38. “Like a large number of men, I, too, have had homosexual experiences and I am not ashamed. But if there is someone who is convinced that Jack Nicholson and I are lovers, may they continue to do so. I find it amusing.”

— Marlon Brando

39. “Food has always been my friend. When I wanted to feel better or had a crisis in my life, I opened the icebox.”

— Marlon Brando

40. “I can still taste that first beer I bought with my own paycheck.”

— Marlon Brando

41. “I’ve always found animals easy to love because their love is unconditional. They are trusting, loyal and undemanding except in wanting love in return.”

— Marlon Brando

42. “Every spring the meadow in front of the house became an ocean of canary-colored mustard blossoms, and when a wind came up, it was like watching a sea of rippling golden waves rising and falling with the breeze like breakers just before they pound into a reef.”

— Marlon Brando

43. “In being a loving son, I suppose I was trying to become a loved son.”

— Marlon Brando

44. “If you’ve never known love, you never know where it is, you don’t know what it looks like or it sounds like, you look in the most unlikely places to find it.”

— Marlon Brando

45. “Maybe you’re desperate for love. Always have been in your life. But you’ve been distrustful of people. Is there anything about them that scares us, that’s dangerous, that’s going to hurt us? Because a lot of people are frightened to death of love.”

— Marlon Brando

46. “People often say that an actor ‘plays’ a character well, but that’s an amateurish notion. Developing a characterization is not merely a matter of putting on makeup and a costume and stuffing Kleenex in your mouth. That’s what actors used to do, and then called it a characterization. In acting everything comes out of what you are, or some aspect of who you are.”

— Marlon Brando

47. “I put on an act sometimes, and people think I’m insensitive. Really, it’s like a kind of armor because I’m too sensitive. If there are two hundred people in a room and one of them doesn’t like me, I’ve got to get out.”

— Marlon Brando

48. “I suppose the story of my life is a search for love, but more than that, I have been looking for a way to repair myself from the damages I suffered early on and to define my obligation, if I had any, to myself and my species.”

— Marlon Brando

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

49. “The close-up says everything, it’s then that an actor’s learned, rehearsed behavior becomes most obvious to an audience and chips away, unconsciously, at its experience of reality. In a close-up, the audience is only inches away, and your face becomes the stage.”

— Marlon Brando

50. “The four pillars of wisdom that support journalistic endeavors are: lies, stupidity, money-grubbing, and ethical irresponsibility.”

— Marlon Brando