Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
No one likes documentaries.
The stuff about film being a collaborative medium is no joke.
The Bush administration will go down in history as the Torture Team.
Documentaries can embrace contradictions in a way that journalism can't.
'24' glamorizes torture. I don't think there's any other way of putting it.
Even with a villain, you don't want him just to be some pockmarked punchbag.
I don't consider myself a very good talker or writer but a pretty good filmmaker.
There are many people, including me, who admire the original mission of WikiLeaks.
You can't expect the institution to learn, if it doesn't accept any sense of justice.
It's difficult for one filmmaker to criticize another. That's a job best left to critics.
Dialogue between people of differing views is critical for fostering understanding in a democracy.
With every project I start out on, there's no footage. It's always a big slog to find the footage.
What a terrible world it would be if we only did films that were poster boards for political causes.
It's easy to get armchair analysts to talk, but to get people on the inside to talk is very, very hard.
In the case of the Catholic Church, it's hard to understand how they so willfully sacrifice the children.
Suicides aren't heroic in my opinion. And I don't think anybody ever really knows why somebody commits suicide.
I'm a good learner. I can dig in. I knew nothing about mark-to-market accounting when I started the 'Enron' film.
If people are portrayed as monsters, we become disconnected from them, and to me that is not remotely interesting.
When it comes to governments and corporations, we should demand that less is secret. That's where corruption flowers.
I feel that Julian Assange came to be both paranoid and self-regarding in ways that ultimately undermined his own mission.
Fundamental problem in American democracy is that we are allowing congressmen and senators to be bought and sold like sneakers.
The Church must be all-powerful. You discover these horrors within institutions because predators find ways of hiding in plain sight.
I come from a filmmaking tradition and a storytelling background. So somehow I've emerged like a mutant who can straddle both worlds.
Long ago I had a professor who told me, 'Embrace the contradictions.' I think that is what is most interesting about people like Jobs.
We live in a world where everyone thinks they do the right thing, so they are entitled to do the wrong thing. So ends can justify the means.
Wikileaks in its essence is a publisher, pure and simple. They were very much in the same position as 'The New York Times' and 'The Guardian.'
It would be hard to go to your neighbor and say the things people say on the Internet without getting punched out or having your tires slashed.
There's something magical about a home run. It almost violates the space of the stadium. It's a game of the imagination in some ways. Baseball.
The job of a journalist is to find out stuff. The job of the government - sometimes - is to keep stuff secret. There's a natural tension there.
As the power of governments wanes, corporations become ever more powerful. Sometimes they do things that aren't so good. We should pay attention.
Many people have this memory of traditional TV documentary-making that aims to portray pure reality, and I just don't see that as the only option.
Every film may not be appropriate for a theatrical release, and the theatrical business is not a very good business for anybody except the distributor.
Insurance companies pay big bucks for procedures but next to nothing for patient consultations and preventive medicine, which is what most medicine is.
Jobs' incredible skill was as a storyteller, a salesman. He could captivate our imaginations and reel us in. He was more P.T. Barnum than Thomas Edison.
It's hard to make a living doing documentaries. Frankly, if it takes you five years to do a film, and that's the only film you're doing, you're in trouble.
I think many articles in the New Yorker have a strong point of view, but they are so rigorously fact-checked. I wouldn't call them objective, but they feel fair.
There are all sorts of inventive ways to get your film out there: sometimes via the Internet, sometimes via viral screenings in people's living rooms across the country.
Bill Gates, who is the classic computer nerd, as opposed to Steve who is, like the coolest guy in the world. And who is really doing things to make the world a better place?
For years, the Bush Administration eviscerated all the military and legal structures that were designed to separate the innocent from the guilty in the 'Global War on Terror.'
In the U.S., hospitals are rewarded for keeping hospital beds full. That's the market at work. The question is: should we work for the market, or should the market work for us?
The sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church is the result of what police call "noble cause corruption," the belief that because you are dedicated to doing good, you can do no wrong.
I thought it was a classic David and Goliath story, and I was fully onboard Team WikiLeaks. I was very pro the leaks, barring the redaction issue. But I see WikiLeaks as a publisher.
I remember when I did my Enron film, my executive producers at the time felt very strongly that I should mock the Enron executives more viciously because everybody wanted that moment.
The funny thing about being Catholic, and I was raised Catholic, is that you identify with the Church, just as part of your character. Nevermind what you believe, it's just who you are.
In many ways, I'm a big admirer still of Julian Assange. He had balls to do what he did and his motivations in terms of holding the powerful to account are tremendously inspiring to me.
I'm a sports junkie, and I am interested in athletic will - how you exceed the expectations of your own performance when it counts to deliver something beyond yourself so that you can win.
I think the future of journalism is going to be a battle between caution and recklessness. And I think a little bit of recklessness is a good thing, as some of the WikiLeaks cables proved.
Jesus Christ never preached there should be celibate priests. The only reason the church has this is because it's a mechanism of power and control. You can control priests who are celibate.
Now, unfortunately, some prissy card-carrying members of the U.S. Constitution have made us all look bad by pointing out that many of the Gitmo detainees weren't guilty of anything. Whoops!
You have to assume once you go online, anything you put there can be made public. Yet while you're online, you feel like it's a private, sacred space. But you're really broadcasting to the world.