Top 70 Oliver Stone Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The first casualty of war is innocence.”

— Oliver Stone

2. “Hell is the impossibility of reason.”

— Oliver Stone

3. “Never underestimate the power of jealousy and the power of envy to destroy. Never underestimate that.”

— Oliver Stone

4. “Greed-for lack of a better word-is good. Greed is right. Greed works.”

— Oliver Stone

5. “To fail is not tragic. To be human, is.”

— Oliver Stone

6. “Nationalism and patriotism are the two most evil forces that I know of in this century or in any century and cause more wars and more death and more destruction to the soul and to human life than anything else.”

— Oliver Stone

7. “Let the capitalists do their own fighting and furnish their own corpses and there will never be another war on the face of the earth.”

— Oliver Stone

8. “Money itself isn’t lost or made, it’s simply transferred from one perception to another. This painting here. I bought it 10 years ago for 60 thousand dollars. I could sell it today for 600. The illusion has become real and the more real it becomes, the more desperately they want it.”

— Oliver Stone

9. “The worst nightmare I ever had about Vietnam was that I had to go back. I woke up in a sweat, in total terror.”

— Oliver Stone

10. “Football is mesmerizing, because it’s a figurative war. You go in one direction till you get there, but you get there as a team, not as an individual. Players bond whether they’re black or white, much as soldiers do.”

— Oliver Stone

11. “Conspiracy nut, leftist, madman. These are terms of dismissal so you don’t have to listen to the argument. It would be healthier and more fun to hear what someone has to say.”

— Oliver Stone

12. “I might as well be myself. Everyone else is taken.”

— Oliver Stone

13. “I’m a dramatist. Dramatists have a right to look at history and interpret it the way they see it.”

— Oliver Stone

14. “I study history in order to give an interpretation.”

— Oliver Stone

15. “Independence is a state of mind. Independence is spirit without category.”

— Oliver Stone

16. “I think experience will teach you a combination of liberalism and conservatism. We have to be progressive and at the same time we have to retain values. We have to hold onto the past as we explore the future.”

— Oliver Stone

17. “Unfortunately, the truth is that people do go scot-free and it’s unfair. A lot of the top drug people who have been arrested are also free.”

— Oliver Stone

18. “What scares me most about the media is that so many of them don’t realize that by presenting and highlighting certain issues, opinions, and perspectives over others, they can manipulate and control people’s beliefs in subtle ways.”

— Oliver Stone

19. “Coming Home had been made before and Apocalypse Now and Deer Hunter, different kinds of movies.”

— Oliver Stone

20. “We are seeing entertainment become politics and we’re seeing people acting out in ways that are extremely violent and destabilizing. No rules apply. We’re in an era of no rules now, it seems.”

— Oliver Stone

21. “I wish that George W. Bush had gone to Vietnam, because he would have seen history in a different light. He would’ve experienced it in a different light because I don’t think he understood the nature of war.”

— Oliver Stone

22. “I will come out with my interpretation. If I’m wrong, fine. It will become part of the debris of history, part of the give and take.”

— Oliver Stone

23. “I make my films like you’re going to die if you miss the next minute. You better not go get popcorn.”

— Oliver Stone

24. “My protest against digital has been me saying, “What’s going to happen to film?” The result is that Kodak is out of business. That’s a national tragedy. We’ve got to keep making film.”

— Oliver Stone

25. “A woman can be very beautiful and an ideal model and she will photograph incredibly well, but she’ll appear in film and it won’t work. What works is some fusion of physical beauty with some mental field or whatever you call it. I don’t know.”

— Oliver Stone

26. “Well first of all you have to make the character strong so that people can follow that. And then hopefully that character can integrate with the background of the social situation that people can recognize.”

— Oliver Stone

27. “You’re not a historian, but most historians will tell you that they make very discrete judgment as to what facts to omit in order to make their book into some shape, some length that can be managed.”

— Oliver Stone

28. “When I make a new movie, I always get stuck with, “That’s not an Oliver Stone film.” But I don’t know what to do about that except just move on.”

— Oliver Stone

29. “I’ve liked different women at different times in my life. I’ve been attracted to white women. I’ve been attracted to black women. I’ve been attracted to Asian women. I’ve been attracted to various subspecies of women. I can say with gratitude that I’ve been able to experiment.”

— Oliver Stone

30. “We all have idealism. We think we’re healthy and then, all of a sudden, one day, you have cancer. The truth has a mind of its own.”

— Oliver Stone

31. “Fear may very well be a caveman fear of the predator, of the giant lizard chasing them – maybe that’s what Steven Spielberg connects with so well in Lost World.”

— Oliver Stone

32. “I like automatic weapons. I fought for my right to use them in Vietnam.”

— Oliver Stone

33. “I’m going to hold onto my Blu-ray collection because I really think it’s hardware and it’s important. I don’t want to live in a cloud, all my life.”

— Oliver Stone

34. “The truth is not being aired in the West. It’s a surreal perversion of history that’s going on once again, as in Bush pre-Iraq ‘WMD’ campaign.”

— Oliver Stone

35. “Americans, like people everywhere, are in thrall to their visions of the past, rarely realizing the extent to which their understanding of history shapes behavior in the here and now. Historical understanding defines people’s very sense of what is thinkable and achievable. As a result, many have lost the ability to imagine a world that is substantially different from and better than what exists today.”

— Oliver Stone

36. “I’ve been to war, and it’s not easy to kill. It’s bloody and messy and totally horrifying, and the consequences are serious.”

— Oliver Stone

37. “I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I’m a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.”

— Oliver Stone

38. “Either you’re born crazy or you’re born boring.”

— Oliver Stone

39. “It’s interesting that when economic times were the hardest, that’s when many people embraced liberalism.”

— Oliver Stone

40. “You do the best job you can. You take it step by step. It’s hard enough to make a movie. If it works, that’s great. If it means something beyond the moment to somebody, they can take it and it lasts through the years, we’ll see.”

— Oliver Stone

41. “What needs to happen is more of a global understanding, and I believe the United States can work as a global partner and not be the hegemon.”

— Oliver Stone

42. “When you look at a movie, you look at a director’s thought process.”

— Oliver Stone

43. “I’m terrible at horror movies, by the way. I get scared so easily.”

— Oliver Stone

44. “Forget the grand plan. Forget the master scheme. Forget control. That is the bleak but true basis of independent cinema. Inch by motherfuking inch we must, because we have no other choice.”

— Oliver Stone

45. “But in answer to your question about the conspiracy angle, I think that any historian worth his salt, and this is where I fault Stephen Ambrose and a lot of these guys who attack me – not all of life is a result of conspiracy by any means! Accident occurs alongside conspiracy.”

— Oliver Stone

46. “I don’t think most people in the US realize how important WikiLeaks is and why Julian’s case needs support.”

— Oliver Stone

47. “But I suppose film is distinctive because of its nature, of its being able to cut through time with editing.”

— Oliver Stone

48. “I never put out a history, I put out a dramatic history.”

— Oliver Stone

49. “In any film there’s always a historical implication.”

— Oliver Stone

50. “Anybody who’s been through a divorce will tell you that at one point. they’ve thought murder. The line between thinking murder and doing murder isn’t that major.”

— Oliver Stone