Top 35 Richard Dreyfuss Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You don’t have to act as if you care; you just have to care enough to act.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

2. “I’m nothing if not honest.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

3. “Wake up and live. It’s a fast world out there.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

4. “It is an obvious and blatant stupidity beyond my ability to articulate how dumb it is for us not to teach our children how to run the government.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

5. “People who commit adultery must die. Everyone knows that. Any movie tells you that!”

— Richard Dreyfuss

6. “If I wasn’t an actor, I’d be a teacher, a history teacher. After all, teaching is very much like performing. A teacher is an actor, in a way. It takes a great deal to get, and hold, a class.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

7. “Civility is not not saying negative or harsh things. It is not the absence of critical analysis. It is the manner in which we are sharing this territorial freedom of political discussion. If our discourse is yelled and screamed and interrupted and patronized, that’s uncivil.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

8. “There is one solution to all of our problems: Teaching our kids clarity of thought and political representation in democracy. That’s it.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

9. “It’s fun to see the light in someone’s eyes. It’s fun to give your own eccentric experience and have it land. That’s fun.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

Featured in: Fun Quotes

10. “John Kennedy really did extend the reach of the American people and said, like Lincoln said in a way, that our reach is farther than our grasp – and we should aim high.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

11. “I really think that living is the process of going from complete certainty to complete ignorance.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

12. “Part of me is still waiting to grow up, to be an adult, and the other part knows there is no such thing.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

13. “When you Google me, you’ll find a lot of people don’t like Richard Dreyfuss. Because I’m cocky and I present a cocky attitude. But no one has ever disagreed with the notion I represent, that we need more civic education. So far there’s 100 percent support for that.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

14. “Tabouli is the best salad, but still, you don’t win friends with salad.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

15. “The bad guy always gets the best scene and the best lines in the film, and they usually get the most days off.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

16. “My worst fear is that I’ll end up living in some run-down duplex on Wilshire wearing pants hiked up to my nipples and muttering under my breath.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

17. “Happiness has a bad rap. People say it shouldn’t be your goal in life. Oh, yes it should.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

18. “We mistake politics for legislative debate. You can be passionate without being personal.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

19. “I believe that a nation that allows music to be expendable is in danger of becoming expendable itself.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

20. “She did the best that we could be; she was perfectly charming and perfectly loving. She was a dream. And she was the kind of dream that you remember when you wake up smiling.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

21. “The happiest I ever been was when I was a struggling actor. I’ve had big houses and small houses. I always had work available for most of my career. When I actually had to find jobs to make money, that’s when I was happy.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

22. “It must be remembered that the Bush White House has a separate talent for character assassination that must not be confused with a talent for governance.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

23. “When you work in front of the people, either in a film or in television, the people who are in the room with you are not watching you work, they’re working so you’d have to light a fire to get them to watch what you were doing.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

24. “I said to my doctor, ‘You gotta testme, there’s something wrong with me that I would be behaving this way.’”

— Richard Dreyfuss

25. “I decided at age 9, but I was reinforced at age 13 when a teacher told me I had talent. I can’t say she really motivated me because I already knew. I knew I had talent. I went to the Jewish community theater and got in plays there. Then I went for the movies.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

26. “I didn’t understand 3-D in the fifties and I can’t say I get it now either. I just don’t see what the big deal is.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

27. “I don’t know what its like for most actors, but really clearly for myself acting has always been the fulfillment of personal fantasies. It isn’t just art, its about being a person I’ve always wanted to be, or being in a situation, or being a hero.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

28. “I never had a role that I set out for. I always wanted to have a body of work that I’m proud of. Save for two projects, which will never pass my lips, I’m happy with what I’ve done.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

29. “The rules are all wrong today. The mandate of the media really does pre-date the founding of the United States.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

30. “By telling my own story, I hope to help remove the stigma. It never should be something to hide.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

31. “Let’s give some substance to patriotism. It may take a generation.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

32. “Theater is completely different from film or television. It has a beginning and a middle and an end and it’s different every night. And it’s far preferable to any other except in the sense of not getting paid, people who want to eat should do film and television.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

33. “I have more fun and more grand and glorious moments of my life than anyone I’ve never known. I know that some people call that manic-depress, and that other people call that being touched by God. I just call myself lucky.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

Featured in: Fun Quotes

34. “Power never turns power down, ever, unless institutionally demanded.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

35. “In my experience, it’s usually up to the actor how a character is portrayed.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

36. “We have lost our faith in the powers that brought us this far – the powers of will, imagination, effort, and community.”

— Richard Dreyfuss