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Movies are like a machine that generates empathy.

Roger Ebert

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Roger Ebert
Age: 70 †
Born: 1942
Born: June 18
Died: 2013
Died: April 4
Film Critic
Journalist
Presenter
Reporter
Screenwriter
Writer
Urbana
Illinois
Roger Joseph Ebert
Machines
Movies
Like
Generates
Empathy
Machine

More quotes by Roger Ebert

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While I am usually in despair when a movie abandons its plot for a third act given over entirely to action, I have no problem with the way Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets ends, because it has been pointing toward this ending, hinting about it, preparing us for it, all the way through. What a glorious movie.
Roger Ebert
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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
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And the sexes eyeing each other uneasily, for nothing is easier for a teenager to imagine than rejection.
Roger Ebert
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I have no fear of death. We all die. I consider my remaining days to be like money in the bank. When it is all gone, I will be repossessed.
Roger Ebert
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How quickly do we grow accustomed to wonders. I am reminded of the Isaac Asimov story Nightfall, about the planet where the stars were visible only once in a thousand years. So awesome was the sight that it drove men mad. We who can see the stars every night glance up casually at the cosmos and then quickly down again, searching for a Dairy Queen.
Roger Ebert
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Steve Coogan picks up enough to lecture an interviewer: This is a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about. Later it's claimed that Tristram Shandy was No. 8 on the Observer's list of the greatest novels, which cheers everyone until they discover the list was chronological.
Roger Ebert
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There are often lists of the great living male movie stars. How often do you see the name of Nicolas Cage? He should always be up there. He's daring and fearless in his choice of roles, and unafraid to crawl out on a limb, saw it off and remain suspended in air.
Roger Ebert
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If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen.
Roger Ebert
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I think most people are more susceptible to prejudice than to reason.
Roger Ebert
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Since any reasonable person would choose a Mac over a PC, Apple's market share provides us with an accurate reading of the percentage of reasonable people in our society.
Roger Ebert
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'Marley' does what is probably the best possible job of documenting an important life.
Roger Ebert
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Because of the rush of human knowledge, because of the digital revolution, I have a voice, and I do not need to scream.
Roger Ebert
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We live in a box of space and time. Movies are windows in its walls.
Roger Ebert
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You slide down in your seat and make yourself comfortable. On the screen in front of you, the movie image appears—enormous and overwhelming. If the movie is a good one, you allow yourself to be absorbed in its fantasy, and its dreams become part of your memories
Roger Ebert
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If there's anything I hate more than a stupid action comedy, it's an incompetent stupid action comedy. It's not so bad it's good. It's so bad it's nothing else but bad.
Roger Ebert
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Dirty Love wasn't written and directed, it was committed. Here is a film so pitiful, it doesn't rise to the level of badness. It is hopelessly incompetent... I am not certain that anyone involved has ever seen a movie, or knows what one is.
Roger Ebert
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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
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Socrates told us, the unexamined life is not worth living. I think he's calling for curiosity, more than knowledge. In every human society at all times and at all levels, the curious are at the leading edge.
Roger Ebert
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Of what use is freedom of speech to those who fear to offend?
Roger Ebert
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'Grand Illusion' and 'Rules of the Game' are routinely included on lists of the greatest films, and deserve to be.
Roger Ebert