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Of all the arts, movies are the most powerful aid to empathy, and good ones make us into better people.

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
Art
Better
Make
Empathy
Good
Arts
People
Aids
Ones
Movies
Powerful

More quotes by Roger Ebert

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Most people choose movies that provide exactly what they expect, and tell them things they already know. Others are more curious. We are put on this planet only once, and to limit ourselves to the familiar is a crime against our minds.
Roger Ebert
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I am not a believer, not an atheist, not an agnostic. I am still awake at night, asking how? I am more content with the question than I would be with an answer.
Roger Ebert
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Teenagers used to go to the movies to see adults having sex. Today adults go to the movies to see teenagers having sex.
Roger Ebert
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I think most people are more susceptible to prejudice than to reason. And the parrots of talk radio are just sending out the same stuff. When I look at my e-mails, I see the same Limbaugh rhetoric apparently, people don't have any ideas of their own. And there's just this drumroll of anti-progressive thought.
Roger Ebert
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We live in a box of space and time. Movies are windows in its walls. They allow us to enter other minds, not simply in the sense of identifying with the characters, although that is an important part of it, but by seeing the world as another person sees it.
Roger Ebert
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In the best of all possible worlds, directors would obsess about the quality of their storytelling, and not the details of their technical methods.
Roger Ebert
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Only enormously talented people could have made Death to Smoochy . Those with lesser gifts would have lacked the nerve to make a film so bad, so miscalculated, so lacking any connection with any possible audience.
Roger Ebert
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Occasionally an unsuspecting innocent will stumble into a movie like this and send me an anguished postcard, asking how I could possibly give a favorable review to such trash. My stock response is Ebert's Law, which reads: A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it.
Roger Ebert
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Teaching prejudice to a child is itself a form of bullying. You've got to be taught to hate.
Roger Ebert
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They're not trying to prevent Hollywood from making movies. They're asking that the most powerful image-building machinery in the world stop grinding out killer dykes and twisted homo sex fiends as if sexual orientation had anything to do with criminal behavior.
Roger Ebert
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I was instructed long ago by a wise editor, If you understand something you can explain it so that almost anyone can understand it. If you don't, you won't be able to understand your own explanation. That is why 90% of academic film theory is bullshit. Jargon is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
Roger Ebert
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Blockbusters run the mainstream industry. We may never again have a decade like the 1970s, when directors were able to find such freedom.
Roger Ebert
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Cinema, for me, has always been something like music composed with photographic images.
Roger Ebert
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When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thought falls aside and it is all just THERE. I think of the next word no more than the composer thinks of the next note.
Roger Ebert
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On this ancient and miraculous world, where such beautiful natural and living things have evolved, something has gone wrong when life itself is used as a manufacturing process.
Roger Ebert
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Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message. Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community.
Roger Ebert
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Many thrillers follow such reliable formulas that you can look at what's happening and guess how much longer a film has to run.
Roger Ebert
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A film is a terrible thing to waste.
Roger Ebert
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But the fact is, most people are not going to be rich someday.
Roger Ebert
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It's not often a thriller keeps me wound up as well as 'Headhunters' did. I knew I was being manipulated and didn't care. It was a pleasure to see how well it was being done.
Roger Ebert