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The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is a capital crime, aren't you halfway there?

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
Ideas
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Capital
Live
Perhaps
Define
Right
State
Punishment
Many
Ability
Notion
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People
Idea
Kill
Europeans
Someone
Accept
Halfway
States
Aren
Holocaust
Able
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Clue

More quotes by Roger Ebert

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From a dramatic viewpoint, there are few professions that grant their members entry into other lives, high among them cops, doctors, clergymen, journalists and prostitutes. Perhaps that explains why they figure in so much television and cinema. Their lives are lived in the midst of human drama.
Roger Ebert
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Someone once said the fundamental reason we get married is because have a universal human need for a witness.
Roger Ebert
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It amazes me that filmmakers will still film, and audiences will still watch, relationships so bankrupt of human feeling that the characters could be reading dialogue written by a computer.
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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In Hollywood, 'under development' means 'all I have is the title.'
Roger Ebert
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A movie isn't good or bad based on its politics. It's usually good or bad for other reasons, though you might agree or disagree with its politics.
Roger Ebert
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We laugh, that we may not cry.
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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What I believe is that all clear-minded people should remain two things throughout their lifetimes: Curious and teachable.
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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When I had been a film critic for ten minutes, I treated Doris Day as a target for cheap shots. I have learned enough to say today that the woman was remarkably gifted.
Roger Ebert
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When a girl says she likes you as a friend, what she means is: Rather than have sex with you, I would prefer to lose you as a friend.
Roger Ebert
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What happens in a fantasy can be more involving than what happens in life, and thank goodness for that.
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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I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting.
Roger Ebert
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I begin to feel like I was in the last generation of Americans who took a civics class. 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
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We can't help identifying with the protagonist. It's coded in our movie-going DNA.
Roger Ebert
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Steven Spielberg makes Minority Report with the newest digital technology other directors seem to be trying to make their movies from it.
Roger Ebert
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Crowds can be frightening. They have a way of impressing the low, base taste upon their members. Watching the way thousands of people in his audience could not think for themselves, could not find the courage to allow their ordinary feelings of decency and taste to prevail, I understood better how demagogues are possible.
Roger Ebert