Top 300 Roger Ebert Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “It is not enough for a movie to be righteous. It must also be watchable.”

— Roger Ebert

202. “I believe that young people wearing hoods, unless they are very young, can be frightening. What are they hiding? Why don’t they want to come out into the light with the rest of us? They may be perfectly nice, but the hoods send an uncertain statement.”

— Roger Ebert

203. “Skateboarding is forever, and things like college and girls only ruin an endlessly savored adolescence.”

— Roger Ebert

204. “All good art is about something deeper than it admits.”

— Roger Ebert

205. “Films to the degree that they glorify mindlessness and short attention span they are bad, to the degree that they encourage empathy with people not like ourselves and encourage us to think about life, they are good.”

— Roger Ebert

206. “I began to realize that I had tended to avoid some people because of my instant conclusions about who they were and what they would have to say. I discovered that everyone, speaking honestly and openly, had important things to tell me.”

— Roger Ebert

207. “Steve Coogan picks up enough to lecture an interviewer: This is a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about. Later it’s claimed that Tristram Shandy was No. 8 on the Observer’s list of the greatest novels, which cheers everyone until they discover the list was chronological.”

— Roger Ebert

208. “The movies that last, the ones we return to, don’t always have lofty themes or Byzantine complexities. Sometimes they last because they are arrows straight to the heart.”

— Roger Ebert

209. “Why is it that English, drama and music teachers are most often recalled as our mentors and inspirations? Maybe because artists are rarely members of the popular crowd.”

— Roger Ebert

210. “Occasionally an unsuspecting innocent will stumble into a movie like this and send me an anguished postcard, asking how I could possibly give a favorable review to such trash. My stock response is Ebert’s Law, which reads: A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it.”

— Roger Ebert

211. “I think most people are more susceptible to prejudice than to reason.”

— Roger Ebert

212. “What you see is so much less than what you get.”

— Roger Ebert

213. “Movies are not about moving, but about whether to move.”

— Roger Ebert

214. “It’s the worst kind of bad film: the kind that gets you all worked up and then lets you down, instead of just being lousy from the first shot.”

— Roger Ebert

215. “I know aliens from other worlds are required to arrive in New Mexico, but why stay there?”

— Roger Ebert

216. “All I know is, it is better to be the whale than the squid.”

— Roger Ebert

217. “As we leave the theater, we are absolutely convinced that the only thing keeping the world from going crazy is that the problems of three little people do, after all, amount to more than a hill of beans.”

— Roger Ebert

218. “One of the weapons Marvel used in its climb to comic-book dominance was a willingness to invent new characters at a dizzying speed. There are so many Marvel universes, indeed, that some superheroes do not even exist in one another’s worlds, preventing gridlock.”

— Roger Ebert

219. “Film has become a marketed commodity, and the opportunities and audiences for art cinema have grown smaller. There is a general downturn in cultural literacy, perhaps because of television.”

— Roger Ebert

220. “Perhaps it is the nature of man not to wish to know too much about his own nature.”

— Roger Ebert

221. “That’s what fantasies are for, to help us imagine that things are better than they are.”

— Roger Ebert

222. “It has been said that the reason we establish relationships is to assure ourselves of a witness to our lives.”

— Roger Ebert

223. “Who wants to live in the present? It’s such a limiting period compared to the past.”

— Roger Ebert

224. “Much has been written about Generation X and the films about it. Clerks is so utterly authentic that its heroes have never heard of their generation. When they think of “X,” it’s on the way to the video store.”

— Roger Ebert

225. “What a terrible thing it would be to be the Pope! What unthinkable responsibilities to fall on your shoulders at an advanced age! No privacy. No seclusion. No sin.”

— Roger Ebert

226. “3-D is a waste of a perfectly good dimension. Hollywood’s current crazy stampede toward it is suicidal. It adds nothing essential to the moviegoing experience. For some, it is an annoying distraction. For others, it creates nausea and headaches.”

— Roger Ebert

227. “When you’re young you don’t realize that at every age you are always in the present, and in that sense no older;.”

— Roger Ebert

228. “Entertainment is about the way things should be. Art is about the way they are.”

— Roger Ebert

229. “It is hard enough to be good at all, but to be good in comedy speaks for your character.”

— Roger Ebert

230. “Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message. Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community.”

— Roger Ebert

231. “I don’t think Bush was legitimately elected President.”

— Roger Ebert

232. “The Golden Thumb is not as good as the Oscar, but it is a lot of fun.”

— Roger Ebert

Featured in: Fun Quotes

233. “When we’re discussing who to invite to a dinner party, my wife Chaz and I sometimes use the shorthand, ‘good value for money,’ which indicates guests expected to be entertaining.”

— Roger Ebert

234. “Well, you know what, I’m 60 years old, and I’ve been interested in politics since I was on my daddy’s knee. During the 1948 election, we were praying for Truman. I know a lot about politics.”

— Roger Ebert

235. “Cinema, for me, has always been something like music composed with photographic images.”

— Roger Ebert

236. “Oh, here comes Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny and Jimmy Smits!”

— Roger Ebert

237. “Now I see that all relationships are virtual, even those that take place in person. Whether we use our bodies or a keyboard, it all comes down to two minds crying out from their solitude.”

— Roger Ebert

238. “I find that when I am actually writing, I enter a zone of concentration too small to admit my troubles.”

— Roger Ebert

239. “In our lives, we surf the wave of chance.”

— Roger Ebert

240. “The layout was griping, the glide is awesome. Two ten-inch fins up, way up.”

— Roger Ebert

241. “Drama holds a mirror up to life, but needn’t reproduce it.”

— Roger Ebert

242. “It is commonplace to say that silent films are more “dreamlike,” but what does that mean? In Nosferatu, it means that the characters are confronted with alarming images and denied the freedom to talk them away. There is no repartee in nightmares. Human speech dissipates the shadows and makes a room seem normal. Those things that live only at night do not need to talk, for their victims are asleep, waiting.”

— Roger Ebert

243. “I am proudly a liberal. I am also patriotic, reasonable, pro-American, and stand for family values.”

— Roger Ebert

244. “I felt it would to add a great deal to my legend for eccentricity.”

— Roger Ebert

245. “It’s the same the world over. A Hollywood production comes to town, and the locals all turn movie crazy.”

— Roger Ebert

246. “But the fact is, most people are not going to be rich someday.”

— Roger Ebert

247. “We are poor mortals, but it dreams to us that we can fly.”

— Roger Ebert

248. “I urgently advise hospitals: Do not make the DVD available to your patients; there may be an outbreak of bedpans thrown at TV screens.”

— Roger Ebert

249. “I don’t require movies to be about good people, and I don’t reject screen violence.”

— Roger Ebert

250. “What makes people interesting is the spirit that shines through.”

— Roger Ebert