Quotes by Roger Ebert

Parents and schools should place great emphasis on the idea that it is all right to be different. Racism and all the other 'isms' grow from primitive tribalism, the instinctive hostility against those of another tribe, race, religion, nationality, class or whatever. You are a lucky child if your parents taught you to accept diversity.

— Roger Ebert

Wisdom

Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.

— Roger Ebert

Truth

Lebanon was at one time known as a nation that rose above sectarian hatred; Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East. All of that was blown apart by senseless religious wars, financed and exploited in part by those who sought power and wealth. If women had been in charge, would they have been more sensible? It's a theory.

— Roger Ebert

Wisdom

Why do alcoholics begin down the same hazardous road day after day? They are in search of that elusive window of well-being that opens when you drink your way out of a hangover and aren't yet drunk all over again. The alcoholic's day consists of trying to keep that window open.

— Roger Ebert

Wisdom

I begin to feel like most Americans don't understand the First Amendment, don't understand the idea of freedom of speech, and don't understand that it's the responsibility of the citizen to speak out.

— Roger Ebert

Freedom

Teaching prejudice to a child is itself a form of bullying. You've got to be taught to hate.

— Roger Ebert

Wisdom

Every great film should seem new every time you see it.

— Roger Ebert

Wisdom

There is a part of me that will forever want to be walking under autumn leaves, carrying a briefcase containing the works of Shakespeare and Yeats and a portable chess set. I will pass an old tree under which once on a summer night I lay on the grass with a fragrant young woman and we quoted e.e. cummings back and forth.

— Roger Ebert

Success

Clouds do not really look like camels or sailing ships or castles in the sky. They are simply a natural process at work. So too, perhaps, are our lives.

— Roger Ebert

Success

If your religion doesn't respect the rights of other religions, it is lacking something.

— Roger Ebert

Wisdom

There's something depressing about a young couple helplessly in love. Their state is so perfect, it must be doomed. They project such qualities on their lover that only disappointment can follow.

— Roger Ebert

Love

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

— Roger Ebert

Wisdom

It is reckless to make broad generalizations about any group of people.

— Roger Ebert

Wisdom

I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip.

— Roger Ebert

Love

It's easier to identify with loss than love, because we have had so much more experience of it.

— Roger Ebert

Love

Nothing ever seems straightforward in Venice, least of all its romances.

— Roger Ebert

Love

I'll tell you, I think that the Internet has provided an enormous boost to film criticism by giving people an opportunity to self publish or to find sites that are friendly.

— Roger Ebert

Friendship

We can now have action movies with two stars where one might be African American and one might be Asian American. One of them doesn't have to be white, and the other one doesn't have to be the ethnic sidekick. We're way over that. And I think it's happening in society, too.

— Roger Ebert

Wisdom

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

Life

The idea that a book can advise a woman how to capture a man is touchingly naive. Books advising men how to capture a woman are far less common, perhaps because few men are willing to admit to such a difficulty. For both sexes, I recommend a good novel, offering scenarios you might learn from, if only because they reflect a lot of doubt.

— Roger Ebert

Education

And I think both the left and the right should celebrate people who have different opinions, and disagree with them, and argue with them, and differ with them, but don't just try to shut them up.

— Roger Ebert

Wisdom

No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.

— Roger Ebert

Wisdom

I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do.

— Roger Ebert

Wisdom

By going to the movies, and because of other things, too, going to college, making a wide variety of friends, moving around traveling, I became a lot more open-minded than the heritage I was born into might have suggested.

— Roger Ebert

Friendship