The Manchurian Candidate Quotes

"He felt like dropping the phone, the call, and the whole soggy, masochistic, suicidal thing in the wastebasket."

"Like an angry man with a cane who pokes a hole through the floor of heaven and is scalded by the joy that pours down upon him."

"He was held in a paradox of callousness and feeling: the armor, which he told the world he was, and the feeling, which was what he did not know he was."

"He was a marooned balloonist, supported by nothing visible, looking down on everybody and everything, but yearning to be seen."

"His soul had been rubbed to shreds between the ambivalence of wanting and not wanting; of being able and unable; of loving and hating."

"The conception of people acting against their own best interests should not startle us. We see it occasionally in sleep-walking and in politics, every day."

"The first thing a human being is loyal to, Yen Lo observed, is his own conditioned nervous system."

"His brain had not merely been washed, it had been dry-cleaned."

"The consciousness of guilt gives a scent to humanity, a threat of putrefaction, the ultimate cosmetic."

"Out of his saddened childhood, Raymond had grown to the age for love."

"I have saved your life, and now I may do with it what I will."

"No one has given me a written, printed, bonded guarantee that I will live another week. This girl is now. What the hell do I care about her father's politics any more than I care about your politics? Jocie—Jocie is all I care about."

"What is the consciousness of guilt but the arena floor rushing up to meet the falling trapeze artist?"

"He spent it, if he spent it, on books and off-beat restaurants for he was a gourmet—as much as a man can be who eats behind a newspaper."

"His salary from The Daily Press of one hundred and thirty-five dollars and eighty-one cents, after deductions, he mailed personally to the bank each Friday and considered himself to be both lucky and shrewd to be living in the biggest city on the Western continent for what he regarded at a net of forty dollars per week, cash."

"In the autumn of 1952, two weeks before Raymond’s return from Korea to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor, almost two months before the end of Big John’s statutory final term as governor, U.S. Senator Ole Banstoffsen, the grand old man who had represented his state in Washington for six consecutive terms, succumbed to a heart attack almost immediately after a small dinner with his oldest and dearest friends, Governor and Mrs. John Iselin, and died in the governor’s arms in the manner of a dinner guest of the Empress Livia’s some time before in ancient Rome."

"Raymond had been twelve years old at the time of his mother’s remarriage. He hadn’t particularly liked his father but he disliked his mother so much more that he felt the loss keenly."

"Marco didn’t believe in buying sex because he said it was so much more expensive the other way, and he was loaded with loot."

"Everybody seemed to be an expert on cooking spaghetti and there was a film of red sauce on every white surface in the kitchen."

"The positive thing to be said for Marco was that although he crowded the apartment with girls and loud music and spaghetti and booze, he never invited any other guys."

"Raymond found it enjoyable. He could not have stood it as a constant diet and it was all extremely confusing to him at first."

"They were talking, talking, always talking, but never with the unpleasant garrulity of Johnny Iselin."

"The extraordinary thing to Raymond was that none of them ever returned."

"Marco said that there was not a healthy woman alive who would not gladly agree to rush into bed if that action displaced only the present and did not connect with the past nor had any possibility of any shape in the future."

"Senator Iselin puts the finishing touches on his sabotage of the morale of American scientists to the enormous net gain of those who work against the interests of the United States."

"I have given my life and many, many significant things for all of this. My life. Simply that and I can see that if I were to ransack my strength—remembered strength or future strength—I could not give more to this holy crusade than I have given."

"It is quite possible that I was feeling more or less fragile at that instant."

"I have dreamed many times of a woman I have never seen and will never see because she died in 1395, and to this day the Tuareg recall her in their poetry, in their ahals, telling of her beauty, intelligence, and her wit."

"You became one of my best and bravest thoughts."

"The west side of the island was rich in façades not unlike the possibilities of a fairy princess with syphilis."

"Broadway was patrolled by strange-looking pedestrians, people who had grabbed the wrong face in the dark when someone had shouted 'Fire!' and were now out roaming the streets, desperate to find their own."

"If the Army can't understand, then, what the hell, believe me, Iselin'll understand. He'll get you off the hook."

"Sometimes I think you are the most naïve of young men, and when I read your column, I am sure."

"The love of a good woman does not give way to arbitrage."

"In this life one can turn the other cheek in a Christian manner only so many times."
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"Life isn’t a popularity contest. I didn’t ask them to like me."

"A man needs to have something to lose to become frightened."

"The ultimate end of all of these combative news stories was that when Mrs. Iselin and her son needed to journey to Southampton to embark for home, some one hundred and fifteen London policemen needed to bludgeon a path through the howling mass of outraged citizenry to get them out of their hotel."

"We’ve talked to every member of the patrol. We’ve traveled maybe ninety-two hundred miles around the country."

"The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it."

"It was a vivid room, vivid enough to make a narcoleptic sit up popeyed."

"The valiant, long-cherished hope that they would be able to counterplant suggestion within Raymond’s already dominated unconscious mind never had a chance of being put into work."

"She asked anxiously if Raymond would be there."

"He could not control his grief any longer but he could not understand why he wept. He could not see. Loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss."

"How much you look like Poppa! You have his beautiful hands and you hold your beautiful head in that same proud, proud way. And when you smile! Smile, my darling."

"THEODORE ROOSEVELT SAID THAT THE RIGHT of popular government is incomplete unless it includes the right of voters not merely to choose between candidates when they have been nominated, but also the right to determine who these candidates shall be."

"If the voter expects to find specific issues and clearly defined party policy in the platform he will be sorely disappointed. As a guide to the program to be carried out by the victorious party the platform is also of little value."