Quotes

Dialogue

Howard Beale: I'm gonna blow my brains out right on the air, right in the middle of the seven o'clock news. Max Schumacher: Well, you'll get a hell of a rating, I'll tell you that. A 50 share, at least. We could make a series of it. Suicide of the Week. Aw, hell, why limit ourselves? Execution of the Week. Howard Beale: Terrorist of the Week. Max Schumacher: I love it. Suicides, assassinations, mad bombers, Mafia hitmen, automobile smash-ups: The Death Hour. A great Sunday night show for the whole family. It'd wipe that fuckin' Disney right off the air.

Dialogue

Howard Beale: [on the air] Good evening. Today is Wednesday, September the 24th, and this is my last broadcast. Yesterday I announced on this program that I was going to commit public suicide, admittedly an act of madness. Well, I'll tell you what happened: I just ran out of bullshit. I just ran out of bullshit. Harry Hunter: [picks up ringing phone in editing room] Mr. Schumacher's right here, do you want to talk to him? Howard Beale: Am I still on the air? I really don't know any other way to say it other than I just ran out of bullshit. Bullshit is all the reasons we give for living. And if we can't think up any reasons of our own, we always have the God bullshit. Max Schumacher: [on the phone] Yeah, Tom, what is it? Howard Beale: We don't know why we go through all this pointless pain, humiliation, and decay. So there better be someone somewhere who does know. That's the God bullshit. Max Schumacher: He's saying that life is bullshit, and it is, so what are you screaming about? How

Dialogue

Diana Christensen: I think we can get a hell of a Movie of the Week out of it, maybe even a series...Look, we've got a bunch of hobgoblin radicals called the Ecumenical Liberation Army who go around taking home movies of themselves robbing banks. Maybe they'll take movies of themselves kidnapping heiresses, hijacking 747's, bombing bridges, assassinating ambassadors. We'd open each week's segment with their authentic footage, hire a couple of writers to write some story behind that footage, and we've got ourselves a series. George Bosch: A series about a bunch of, uh, bank-robbing guerrillas? Barbara Schlesinger: What are we gonna call it - the Mao Tse-Tung Hour? Diana Christensen: Why not? They've got 'Strike Force', 'Task Force', 'SWAT'. Why not Che Guevara and his own little 'Mod Squad'. Look, I sent you all a concept analysis report yesterday. Did any of you read it? Well, in a nutshell, it said, 'The American people are turning sullen. They've been clobbered on all sides by Vietna

Dialogue

Diana Christensen: We just increased our audience by twenty or thirty million people in one night. Now, you're not gonna get something like this dumped in your lap for the rest of your days, and you can't just piss it away. Howard Beale got up there last night and said what every American feels, that he's tired of all the bullshit. He's articulating the popular rage. I want that show, Frank. I can turn that show into the biggest smash on television. Frank Hackett: What do you mean, you want that show? It's a news show. It's not your department. Diana Christensen: I see Howard Beale as a latter-day prophet, a magnificent messianic figure, inveighing against the hypocrisies of our times, a strip Savonarola, Monday through Friday. I tell you, Frank, that could just go through the roof. And I'm talking about a six dollar cost per thousand show! I'm talking about a hundred, a hundred thirty thousand dollar minutes! Do you want to figure out the revenues of a strip show that sells for a hund

Dialogue

Nelson Chaney: All I know is that this violates every canon of respectable broadcasting. Frank Hackett: We're not a respectable network. We're a whorehouse network, and we have to take whatever we can get. Nelson Chaney: Well, I don't want any part of it. I don't fancy myself the president of a whorehouse. Frank Hackett: That's very commendable of you, Nelson. Now sit down. Your indignation is duly noted; you can always resign tomorrow.

Dialogue

Max Schumacher: He could be jumping off a roof for all I know. The man is insane. He's not responsible for himself. He needs care and treatment. And all you grave-robbers think about is that he's a hit! Diana Christensen: You know, Max, it's just possible that he isn't insane, that he is, in fact, imbued with some special spirit. Max Schumacher: My God, I'm supposed to be the romantic. You're supposed to be the hard-bitten realist. Diana Christensen: All right. Howard Beale obviously fills a void. The audience out there obviously wants a prophet, even a manufactured one, even if he's as mad as Moses. By tomorrow, he'll have a 50 share, maybe even a 60. Howard Beale is processed instant God, and right now, it looks like he may just go over bigger than Mary Tyler Moore. Max Schumacher: I am not putting Howard back on the air. Diana Christensen: It's not your show any more, Max, it's mine. Frank Hackett: I gave her the show, Schumacher. I'm putting the network news show under programming.

Dialogue

Louise: Then get out. Go anywhere you want. Go to a hotel, go live with her, but don't come back! Because, after 25 years of building a home and raising a family and all the senseless pain that we have inflicted on each other, I'm damned if I'm gonna stand here and have you tell me you're in love with somebody else! Because this isn't a convention weekend with your secretary, is it? Or -- or some broad that you picked up after three belts of booze. This is your great winter romance, isn't it? Your last roar of passion before you settle into your emeritus years. Is that what's left for me? Is that my share? She gets the winter passion, and I get the dotage? What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to sit at home knitting and purling while you slink back like some penitent drunk? I'm your wife, damn it! And if you can't work up a winter passion for me, the least I require is respect and allegiance! [sobbing] I hurt! Don't you understand that? I hurt badly! Does she love you, Max? Max Schu

Dialogue

Arthur Jensen: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale! And I won't have it! Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal – that is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations, there are no peoples, there are no Russians, there are no Arabs, there are no third worlds, there is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars! Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds and shekels! It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and sub-atomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have medd

Dialogue

Diana Christensen: (on the phone) You're his goddamn agent. I'm counting on you to talk some sense into the lunatic. Nobody wants to hear about dying democracy and dehumanization. Max Schumacher: I'm sorry I'm late. Diana Christensen: (still on the phone) We're starting to get rumbles from the agencies. Another couple of weeks and the sponsors will be bailing out! This is a breach of contract. This isn't the Howard Beale we signed. Get him off that corporate universe kick, or so help me, I'll pull it off the air! I told him, Lou! I've been telling him every day for a week! I'm sick of telling him. Now you tell him! (hangs up) Jesus Christ. You could help me out with Howard if you wanted to. He listens to you. You're his best friend. Max Schumacher: I'm tired of all this hysteria about Howard Beale. Diana Christensen: Every time you come from seeing somebody in your family you come back in one of these middle-aged moods. Max Schumacher: And I'm tired of finding you on the god-damn telep

Dialogue

Diana Christensen: Will you go back to your wife? Max Schumacher: I'll give it a try, but I don't think she'll jump at it. But don't worry about me. I'll manage. I always have, I always will. I'm more concerned about you. You're not the boozer type. So I figure a year, maybe two, before you crack up. Or jump out of your 14th floor office window. Diana Christensen: Stop selling, Max. I don't need you. I don't want your pain. I don't want your menopausal decay and death! I don't need you, Max. Now get out of here! Max Schumacher: You need me. You need me badly. Because I'm your last contact with human reality. I love you. And that painful, decaying love is the only thing between you and the shrieking nothingness you live the rest of the day. Diana Christensen: Then don't leave me. Max Schumacher: It's too late, Diana. There's nothing left in you that I can live with. You're one of Howard's humanoids. If I stay with you, I'll be destroyed. Like Howard Beale was destroyed. Like Laureen Hob