Top 48 Trumbo Quotes
#1. When I produced Spartacus, the writer was Dalton Trumbo, who spent a year in jail because he would not answer McCarthy's questions about other people. He submitted the picture under the false name of Sam Jackson.
Kirk Douglas
#2. I worked with Dalton Trumbo, who served time for refusing to give up names of people that were accused of being Communists. I've always admired him.
Anthony Geary
#3. Trumbo was that, certainly: a prodigy of the will. He hung in there - survived, prevailed, even triumphed on a couple of occasions. Ultimately, that is why he is worth our attention.
Bruce Cook
#4. Within the same hour as the murder took place, Isabel Trumbo sat in her armchair dozing, the Alaskan Outdoor magazine on her lap. Her kid sister Alma fidgeted in the other armchair, from time to time picking up her newspaper folded over to the day's crossword puzzle.
Ed Lynskey
#5. Isabel frowned. "Alma Trumbo, you did not just dig up a human bone from our flowerbed. It's got to be a dinosaur bone, dinky or not."
"A dinosaur bone, eh?" The short, stout Alma gave her tall, slim sister the old up and down. "What then, are we the Flintstones living in Bedrock?
Ed Lynskey
#7. The chief internal enemies of any state are those public officials who betray the trust imposed upon them by the people.
Dalton Trumbo
#8. You're dead mister and you died for nothing.
You're dead mister.
Dead.
Dalton Trumbo
#9. If I were dead and buried And I heard your voice, Beneath the sod My heart of dust Would still rejoice.
Dalton Trumbo
#10. One of the disadvantages of being a patrician is that occasionally you're obliged to act like one.
Dalton Trumbo
#11. A good businessman never makes a contract unless he's sure he can carry it through, yet every fool on earth is perfectly willing to sign a marriage contract without considering whether he can live up to it or not.
Dalton Trumbo
#12. Privately, I believe in none of them. Neither do you. Publicly, I believe in them all.
Dalton Trumbo
#13. An equation: 40,000 dead young men = 3,000 tons of bone and flesh, 124,000 pounds of brain matter, 50,000 gallons of blood, 1,840,000 years of life that will never be lived, 100,000 children that will never be born (the last we can afford: there are too many starving children in the world already).
Dalton Trumbo
#14. WHAT YOU ASK IS AGAINST REGULATIONS WHO ARE YOU
Dalton Trumbo
#15. The only interesting thing that can happen in a Swiss bedroom is suffocation by feather mattress.
Dalton Trumbo
#16. There's a game out there, and the stakes are high. And the guy who runs it figures the averages all day long and all night long. Once in a while he lets you steal a pot. But if you stay in the game long enough, you've got to lose. And once you've lost there's no way back, no way at all.
Dalton Trumbo
#17. I will, proudly and by preference, do at least one picture a year for King Brothers, and I will try to make it the best picture that I have it in me to do.
Dalton Trumbo
#18. New nursery rhymes for new times. HIckory dickery dock my daddy's nuts from shelshock. Humpty dumpty thought he was wise till gas came along and hurned out his eyes. A dillar a dollar a ten o-clock schollar blow off his legs and then watch him holler ...
Dalton Trumbo
#20. Bill Harper was a lucky guy. Bill Harper had got Diane and then he had been killed.
Dalton Trumbo
#21. They feel guilty for having survived so they pretend the bad things never happened
Exodus (1960) screenplay
Dalton Trumbo
#22. Now I lay me down to sleep my bomb proof cellar's good and deep but if I'm killed before I wake remember god it's for your sake amen.
Dalton Trumbo
#23. There are plenty of laws to protect guys' money even in war time but there's nothing on the books says a man's life's his own.
Dalton Trumbo
#24. An animal can learn to fight, but to sing beautiful things and make people believe them ...
Dalton Trumbo
#25. You show me a politician with his heels ten feet in the air, and by Judas priest, Ill show you an honest politician.
Dalton Trumbo
#26. When one man says, "No, I won't," Rome begins to fear.
Dalton Trumbo
#27. The blacklist was a time of evil ... no one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil ... [Looking] back on this time ... it will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because there were none; there were only victims.
Dalton Trumbo
#28. Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.
Dalton Trumbo
#29. I am one day going to be working openly in the motion picture industry. When that day comes, I swear to you that I will never sign a term contract with any major studio.
Dalton Trumbo
#30. Bankers, nepotists, contracts and talkies: on four fingers one may count the leeches which have sucked a young and vigorous industry into paresis.
Dalton Trumbo
#31. Hickory dickory dock my daddy's nuts from shellshock.
Dalton Trumbo
#32. How could you believe or disbelieve anything anymore? Four maybe five million men killed and none of them wanting to die while hundreds maybe thousands were left crazy or blind or crippled and couldn't die no matter how hard they tried.
Dalton Trumbo
#33. Nothing is bigger than life. There's nothing noble in death. What's noble about never seeing the sunshine again? What's noble about having your legs and arms blown off? What's noble about being an idiot? What's noble about being blind and deaf and dumb? What's noble about being dead?
Dalton Trumbo
#34. I feel like my sixteenth birthday and the time I graduated from high school, and the first time I flew solo all wrapped up in one.
Dalton Trumbo
#35. Now the truth of the matter is that there are a lot of things people don't understand. Take the Einstein theory. Take taxes. Take love. Do you understand them? Neither do I. But they exist. They happen.
Dalton Trumbo
#37. Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo
#38. A man doesn't say I will starve myself to death to keep from starving, or that he'd spend all of his money to save money. Why should he be willing to die for the privilege of living?
Dalton Trumbo
#39. We'll free every slave in every town and region. Can anybody get a bigger army than that?
Dalton Trumbo
#41. I never considered the working class anything other than something to get out of.
Dalton Trumbo
#43. The only kind of love worth having is the kind that goes on living and laughing and fighting and loving.
Dalton Trumbo
#44. Numbers have dehumanized us. Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 American dead in Vietnam. Instead of vomiting, we reach for the toast. Our morning rush through crowded streets is not to cry murder but to hit that trough before somebody else gobbles our share.
Dalton Trumbo
#45. Democracy means that people can say what they want to. All the people. It means that they can vote as they wish. All the people. It means that they can worship God in any way they feel right, and that includes Christians and Jews and voodoo doctors as well.
Dalton Trumbo
#46. He could almost hear the wail of pain that went up from his heart. It was a sharp terrible personal pain the kind of pain that comes only when someone to whom you have never done any harm turns on you and says goodbye goodbye forever without any reason for doing it. Without any reason at all.
Dalton Trumbo
#47. There ought to be at least as much common sense about living and dying as there is about going to the grocery store and buying a loaf of bread.
Dalton Trumbo
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