Paddy Chayefsky quotes

God save us all from people who do the morally right thing. It's always the rest of us who get broken in half. (Paddy Chayefsky)

Television is democracy at its ugliest.

Paddy Chayefsky

I don't want to know what's good, or bad, or true. I let God worry about the truth. I just want to know the momentary fact about things. Life isn't good, or bad, or true. It's merely factual, it's sensual, it's alive. My idea of living sensual facts are you, a home, a country, a world, a universe. In that order. I want to know what I am, not what I should be.

Paddy Chayefsky

Television is not the truth. Television is a goddamned amusement park.

Paddy Chayefsky

I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!

Paddy Chayefsky

You don't send a man to his death because you want a hero.

Paddy Chayefsky

Artists don't talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it's stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.

Paddy Chayefsky

It's always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a hell it is. And it's always the war widows who lead the Memorial Day parades.

Paddy Chayefsky

There's lots of things I'd die for, Emily; my home, my family, my country. But that's love, not principle.

Paddy Chayefsky

Now what in hell am I going to tell this boy Schaefer's parents? That a substitute nurse assassinated him because she couldn't tell the doctors from the patients on the floor?

Paddy Chayefsky

It's hard for me to take your despair very seriously, Doctor. You obviously enjoy it so much. (Paddy Chayefsky)

War isn't a fraud, Charlie, it's very real.

Paddy Chayefsky

All my brothers and brothers-in-laws tell me what a good-hearted guy I am. You don't get to be good-hearted by accident.

Paddy Chayefsky

You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to believe that the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal.

Paddy Chayefsky

Well, all I know is I had a good time last night. I'm gonna have a good time tonight. If we have enough good times together, I'm gonna get down on my knees and I'm gonna beg that girl to marry me.

Paddy Chayefsky

You're forever falling for men on their last nights on furlough. That's about the limit of your commitments, one night, a day, a month.

Paddy Chayefsky

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business.

Paddy Chayefsky

You see, dogs like us, we ain't such dogs as we think we are.

Paddy Chayefsky

We all live with it. That unbearable terror is what makes us such singular creatures.

Paddy Chayefsky

When I say impotent, I mean I've lost even my desire to work. That's a hell of a lot more primal passion than sex. I've lost my reason for being. My purpose.

Paddy Chayefsky

In God's name, you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion! (Paddy Chayefsky)

I was in that ultimate moment of terror that is the beginning of life. It is nothing. Simple, hideous nothing.

Paddy Chayefsky

We shall never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on the ministers and generals, or warmongering imperialists, or all the other banal bogeys. It's the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers.

Paddy Chayefsky

Television is not the truth! Television is a goddamned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a travelling troupe of acrobats and story-tellers, singers and dancers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion-tamers and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business!

Paddy Chayefsky

All my brothers, my brothers-in-law, they're always telling me what a good-hearted guy I am. You don't get to be good-hearted by accident. You get kicked around long enough, you get to be a real professor of pain.

Paddy Chayefsky

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