Latest Oliver Stone Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• The beauty of history is that historians have the ability to find patterns, the big picture. When you make a movie, you try to find that. I'm doing in the cinema what historians try to do in their own media.

  Oliver Stone

  Trying, Big Picture, Ability

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• I want my children to have access to something that looks beyond what I call the tyranny of now. You read the paper, everyone talks about that thing [in the news] that day, and all the subconscious really important stuff that's going on is being neglected. The beauty of history is that historians have the ability to find patterns, the big picture. When you make a movie, you try to find that. I'm doing in the cinema what historians try to do in their own media.

  Oliver Stone

  Children, Important, Trying

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• My schooling was very conservative. I went to Trinity School, and then to the Hill School, which is a boarding school, then to Yale. My parents got divorced in that period, and I realized I didn't have a life anymore. I was the only child, so a three-person family breaks apart. I ended up very conformist, very scared, very lonely. I couldn't go on with Yale, just couldn't do it. I'd been doing too much of that for too long. I didn't know what I wanted, but I knew what I didn't want, which was to go to Wall Street and join the crowd there.

  Oliver Stone

  Lonely, Children, Wall

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I didn't like my classmates at Yale. George W.Bush was in my class. I didn't know it then.

  Oliver Stone

  Classmates

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I can't tell you how many times at the breakfast table my dad would curse out Franklin Roosevelt. I love my father. He was an intelligent man, but he really didn't like regulations of the Roosevelt style, or the taxes. He was an Dwight Eisenhower man. And that's what Eisenhower did, committed to breaking down the program.

  Oliver Stone

  Dad, Father, Intelligent

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Well, George W.Bush wanted to privatize Social Security. It's an ideological thing.

  Oliver Stone

  Ideological, Security

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• After World War II the Republicans - the Wall Street crowd - were very worried about a depression coming back. They hated Franklin Roosevelt in that crowd, my father among them. And there was a great fear in '46 that we'd fall back into the pits. And they always wanted to break up the Roosevelt legislation.

  Oliver Stone

  Wall, Father, War

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• You've also heard stories about how the military-industrial complex really does prefer Hilary Clinton because they know that she's not nuts like some of the Republicans. She will do what they bid. And what they want is basically to stay healthy.

  Oliver Stone

  Healthy, Republican, Clinton

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I think John F. Kennedy was the last great hope. And that's why I dwell on that subject. He was someone who could stand up to the militarist element in our society.

  Oliver Stone

  Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Bernie Sanders is a disappointment on foreign policy, totally doesn't think about it. But he has the possibility to be more isolationist, which would be good for us actually. We manage to kill several million people on this planet without taking any credit for it or blame. It's a heavy karma we have.

  Oliver Stone

  Karma, Disappointment, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Сyber-warfare is obviously the future. It's a real concern, but we lie so much about what we do that it's hard to know what's going on unless you really follow it.

  Oliver Stone

  Real, Lying, Concern

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• The U.S. ultimately decides what the national security threat is. They put Russia one, Iran two, China three - the terrorists are down the list. But it's amazing to me that we can still consider Russia a threat. On the contrary, they've been very helpful in the Middle East, trying to calm the situation and respect the rights of sovereign countries to exist. It's the U.S. that hasn't - whether in Serbia, the old Yugoslavia, in Africa, and now, Iraq.

  Oliver Stone

  Country, Trying, Calm

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I'm not an activist. I'm a filmmaker. I'm a dramatist. My strength is to tell a story, to find a way to tell a story that makes it exciting. Our Untold History was a huge challenge. Snowden was no piece of cake, because writing code and breaking code is some of the most boring stuff you've ever seen.

  Oliver Stone

  Writing, Challenges, Boring

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I gave up on America. I read the Times just to find out what they're thinking. I read blogs. I get most of my best information from people who are there, people who write independently. And there's actually very few of them.

  Oliver Stone

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Robert Kagan said the neocons couldn't get a better president than Hillary Clinton, who would enforce the neocon foreign policy. No one's questioned it.

  Oliver Stone

  President, Clinton, Foreign Policy

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I don't agree with Bernie Sanders that the banks should be broken up at this point. But Hillary Clinton's acceptance of huge contributions from Goldman Sachs and others... And we don't debate what Clinton has done. She has a public record. She's been Secretary of State. She's basically a candidate of Wall Street, for Wall Street.

  Oliver Stone

  Wall, Acceptance, Broken

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• America is the strongest empire ever, with the largest military. We spend ten times what the Russians do. And they have equal nuclear ability as we do, because they're precise.

  Oliver Stone

  Military, Equal, Ability

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Wall Street is a huge issue. And it's controlling our lives today with this so-called election - we really have no choice. We're really just onlookers. The national surveillance state has not been debated by any candidates, Democratic or Republican. Our wars, our repeated wars - our new war in Syria has not been brought up because everyone agrees essentially that we have to continue doing what we're doing. And maybe even now go back to Libya.

  Oliver Stone

  Wall, War, Choices

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• You look at the Russian side: They're defending their territory from the beginning. They move west to destroy the Nazis. And they take out the guts of the German war machine per Winston Churchill, who said that they won the war. From the beginning, we were hostile to the guys who had saved how many American lives by their repulsion of the Nazis? I think the Americans lost 400,000 in the whole war. And the Americans knew it at the time. They gave Joseph Stalin credit. He was the man of the year, cover of Life magazine in 1943; he was a hero.

  Oliver Stone

  War, Moving, Hero

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• There was a certain faction in America that had always been pro-Nazi, including the Allen Dulles people. These were businessmen, Wall Street men.

  Oliver Stone

  Wall, Men, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Franklin Roosevelt saw the world as a possible alliance, with the UN involved, of course, where we would never have these kinds of wars again. And he was equally opposed to the British Empire as he was against the Communist Russians.

  Oliver Stone

  War, World, Kind

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• From '45, the moment Franklin Roosevelt dies, we're running ratlines with the Germans, helping Nazis escape.

  Oliver Stone

  Running, Helping, Moments

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• It's very important to understand that World War II is at the base of this new policy. From the 1890s on, the U.S. was always imperialistic. We went after the Philippines, and we did the same in Cuba, in Hawaii. We controlled South America. Woodrow Wilson was not what he was supposed to be. He was very much a white man first. "The world must be made safe for democracy." It really accelerates after World War II.

  Oliver Stone

  War, Men, Democracy

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Franklin Roosevelt is one of the great leaders because he does get along with other people. He makes this huge effort. He's a very charming man. He tries to bring Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill into this tripartite agreement to run the world. And he really was close. If he hadn't died in April of '45, the whole history would be different.

  Oliver Stone

  Running, Men, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I was trying to find out what happened in my lifetime, because I was an older man. We lived through two terms of George Bush, and I was wondering, "Is he an exception to the rule, or he is a continuation? What is driving all these wars? What is driving this attitude of aggressiveness and militarism?" I got my answer - and it was a shocking answer. I found is this whole strain of history, this whole school has been denied by the media. It is a bizarre blindness, because we are such an intelligent country. It's bizarre that we can't get our own history straight.

  Oliver Stone

  Country, Attitude, War

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com