Roger Ebert quotes

Roger Ebert was an American film critic, journalist, and screenwriter, renowned for his insightful movie reviews. His work at the Chicago Sun-Times and popular television programs made him a household name among film enthusiasts. He became the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize and left a lasting legacy in the world of cinema. Here are 417 of his quotes:

Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.

Roger Ebert

Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.

Roger Ebert

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

I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization.

Roger Ebert

I lost faith in the Oscars the first year I was a movie critic - the year that Bonnie and Clyde didn't win.

Roger Ebert

Of what use is freedom of speech to those who fear to offend?

Roger Ebert

Art is the closest we can come to understanding how a stranger really feels.

Roger Ebert

I think we have to get beyond the idea that we have to categorize people.

Roger Ebert

No movie has ever been able to provide a catharsis for the Holocaust, and I suspect none will ever be able to provide one for 9/11.

Roger Ebert

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

Much has been written about Generation X and the films about it. Clerks is so utterly authentic that its heroes have never heard of their generation. When they think of "X," it's on the way to the video store.

Roger Ebert

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

As I swim through the summer tide of vulgarity, I find that's what I'm looking for: Movies that at least feel affection for their characters. Raunchy is OK. Cruel is not.

Roger Ebert

To know me is to love me. This cliche is popular for a reason, because most of us, I imagine, believe deep in our hearts that if anyone truly got to know us, they'd truly get to love us - or at least know why we're the way we are. The problem in life, maybe the central problem, is that so few people ever seem to have sufficient curiosity to do the job on us that we know we deserve.

Roger Ebert

Absolutists frighten me. During all the endless discussions on my blog about evolution, intelligent design, God, and the afterworld, numbering altogether thousands of comments, I have never named my beliefs, although readers have freely informed me that I am an atheist, and agnostic, or at the very least a secular humanist.

Roger Ebert

It's like the high school production of something you saw at Steppenwolf, with the most gifted students in drama class playing the John Malkovich and Joan Allen roles.

Roger Ebert

I have always had my doubts about any form of divine intervention in sports contests. The power of prayer may be remarkable in many other arenas, but why should God want my team to win instead of the other side? Isn't it insulting to request God to even take an interest in baseball?

Roger Ebert

It is all very well and good for Linda Lovelace, the star of the movie, to advocate sexual freedom; but the energy she brings to her role is less awesome than discouraging. If you have to work this hard at sexual freedom, maybe it isn't worth the effort.

Roger Ebert

It considers not only how we relate to others, but how we relate to our ideas of others - so that a completely phony, non-human replica of a dead wife can inspire the same feelings that the wife herself once did. That is a peculiarity of humans: We feel the same emotions for our ideas as we do for the real world, which is why we can cry while reading a book, or fall in love with movie stars. Our idea of humanity bewitches us, while humanity itself stays safely sealed away into its billions of separate containers, or "people."

Roger Ebert

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

We can now have action movies with two stars where one might be African American and one might be Asian American. One of them doesn't have to be white, and the other one doesn't have to be the ethnic sidekick. We're way over that. And I think it's happening in society, too.

Roger Ebert

I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do.

Roger Ebert