Top 15 Ben Hecht Quotes

A simple fact entered my head one day and put an end to my revolt against the Deity. It occurred to me that God was not engaged in corrupting the mind of man but in creating it. This may sound like no fact at all, or like the most childish of quibbles. But whatever it is, it brought me a sigh of relief, a slightly bitter sigh. I was relieved because instead of beholding a man as a finished and obviously worthless product, unable to bring sanity into human affairs, I looked on him (in my conversion) as a creature in the making. And lo, I was aware that like my stooped and furry brothers, the apes, I am God's incomplete child. My groping brain, no less than my little toe, is a mechanism in His evolution-busy hands.

The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people.

A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.

Movies are one of the bad habits that have corrupted our century. They have slipped into the American mind more misinformation in one evening than the Dark Ages could muster in a decade.

Of the things men give each other the greatest is loyalty.

Like the actor, authority has faith in its false whiskers. But its deepest faith is in the human illusion. People will hang on to illusion as eagerly as life itself.

The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.

There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age.

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.

I was afraid you would think I was bragging.

People's sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political opinions, and much less criticized.

The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.

In Hollywood, a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.

Writing a good movie brings a writer about as much fame as steering a bicycle. It gets him, however, more jobs. If his movie is bad it will attract only critical tut-tut for him. The producer, director, and stars are the geniuses who get the hosannas when it's a hit. Theirs are also the heads that are mounted on spears when it's a flop.

You're such a nice boy, what do you want to go off and get killed in the War for?