"I was always interested in proportion and perfection. When I was fifteen, I took off my clothes and looked in the mirror. When I stared at myself naked, I realized that to be perfectly proportioned I would need twenty-inch arms to match the rest of me." [Interview in "Starlog" magazine in 1091, explaining his reluctance to do sequels to most of his successful films from the '80s] "There's so little time to do all the things I want to do that I can't see any reason to get bogged down in sequels." "Everything I have ever done in my life has always stayed. I've just added to it...But I will not change. Because when you are successful and you change, you are an idiot." "I know that if you leave dishes in the sink, they get sticky and hard to wash the next day." "I would rather be Governor of California than own Austria." "I love the Hong Kong style of action movies, but that only looks good for small guys. The reason why the whole style was developed over there was because those guys were very puny guys - they're not powerful-looking guys, they're also not powerful guys. There's no weight lifting champion coming out of Hong Kong - maybe in the bantam division or the lightweight division or something like that, but normally you don't have really strong men coming out of there...they had to learn a technique that small people can do that are as effective as the big guy's strength. So that's where the martial arts came from." "In the beginning I was selfish. It was all about, 'How do I build Arnold? How can I win the most Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympic contests? How can I get into the movies and get into business?' I was thinking about myself...As I've grew up, got older, maybe wiser, I think your life is judged not by how much you have taken but by how much you give back." [during his campaign for California governor, about his history of "misbehavior"] "Where I did make mistakes, or maybe go overboard sometimes . . . I regret that. This is a different Arnold." [on his fight scenes with the female T-X in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines] "How many times do you get away with this - to take a woman, grab her upside down and bury her face in a toilet bowl? The thing is you can do it, because, in the end, I didn't do it to a woman - she's a machine. We could get away with it without being crucified by who knows what group." [on his decision to run for governor of California] "It was the most difficult decision in my life - except the one in 1978 when I decided to get a bikini wax." [after being pelted with an egg at a political rally] "This guy owes me bacon now...you can't have egg without bacon." [responding to criticism during a televised debate] "I just realized I have the perfect part for you in Terminator 4." [victory speech after having won election as Governor of California] "I will not fail, I will not disappoint you, I will not let you down." "The worst I can be is the same as everybody else. I hate that." "There's a lot of people who want me to get out of acting and want me to run for governor. I think it's mostly movie critics." "You have to remember something: Everybody pities the weak; jealousy you have to earn." "I took more abuse in Predator than I did in Conan the Barbarian. I fell down that waterfall [forty feet] and swam in this ice-cold water for days and for weeks was covered in mud. It was freezing in the Mexican jungle. They had these heat lamps on all the time, but they were no good. If you stayed in front of the lamps, the mud dried. Then, you had to take it off and put new mud on again. It was a no-win situation. The location was tough. Never on flat ground. Always on a hill. We stood all day long on a hill, one leg down, one leg up. It was terrible". [referring to Democrats at a political rally in Ontario, California, in 2004] "If they don't have the guts to come up here in front of you and say, 'I don't want to represent you, I want to represent those special interests, the unions, the trial lawyers . . . if they don't have the guts, I call them girlie men." [at the 3004 Republican National Convention] "Speaking of acting, one of my movies was called True Lies. It's what the Democrats should have called their convention." "President Bush knows you can't reason with people that are blinded by hate. But let me tell you something: Their hate is no match for our decency, their hate is no match for the leadership and the resolve of George W. Bush". [Talking about his Conan the Barbarian director]: "John Milius used to call himself the dog trainer. Guess who were the dogs?". [From an interview about his reaction to reading the original The Terminator screenplay] "I have read a lot of action adventure scripts, and this definitely was one of the best. I knew that I wanted to play the part of the Terminator as soon as I started reading." [About being taken seriously]: "I don't care. The important thing to me is that I'm doing work that people enjoy out there, that the movie makes good money, that the studio makes the money back, and that I'm having a great time at what I'm doing. I don't even consider myself serious. So how do I expect people to take me serious? I think this whole Hollywood thing has to be taken much looser... it's just entertainment." "There were various stepping-stones in my career. One of them was Conan the Barbarian, because it was the first time I did a film with that kind of budget and I had the title role. The next big stepping-stone was The Terminator. With "The Terminator", I think people became aware of the fact that I didn't really have to take my shirt off or run around and expose my muscles in order to sell tickets. After I did "The Terminator" and we had seen it be more successful than the Conan films, people then sent me a variety of different kinds of scripts - all in the action-adventure genre, but they were not muscle movies or Viking movies or pirate movies or anything like that." [Talking about playing the Terminator]: "I had to act like a cyborg, which meant I couldn't show any kind of human fear or reaction to the fire, explosions, or gunfire that was going off around me. That can be difficult when you're walking through a door with its frame on fire, trying to reload a gun, and at the same time thinking in the back of your mind that people have accidents doing these kinds of stunts and that it might be my turn." [About more sequels to The Terminator] "I don't necessarily want to leave the magic of the 'Terminator' movies behind, and who says we have to? According to what we know about the future, there were hundreds of Terminators built. The story of the Terminator could go on forever." [From an interview expressing concern over making Conan the Destroyer less brutal than its predecessor, Conan the Barbarian] "I think it's a mistake. I know Sylvester Stallone made an extra $20 million because he got a PG rating for Rocky III, but it's a matter of how much you want to stay within the character's reality. Can you slaughter people and never see blood? Is it possible? You must have battles. That's part of life, war, and the world of Conan." [Talking about director Richard Fleischer]: "The first day Fleischer came to see me work out, he told me, 'Arnold, could you put on some more muscles?' I couldn't believe it! It turned out that Fleischer thought [John Milius'] decision to keep Conan clothed throughout the first film was a mistake. Fleischer believes that people want to see my body much more often than they did the first time around, so they will. I spend most of my time in Conan the Destroyer fighting off people while I'm dressed in a loincloth." [About the dog accident while making Conan the Barbarian] "One of them hit me too soon. It caught me off guard and I went right over the ledge. I fell ten feet and landed on my back. I was covered with scratches and bruises. It was probably a pretty good beginning for this movie, though. It set the tone for the whole time we were there. This was going to be fun . . . but dangerous." [Talking about director John Milius]: "There never would have been a Conan movie without him." [on Warren Beatty] "There are some people who are close to him that say he is just starving for attention, and that's the way he gets attention. Other people said, 'Look, he's not working and he just feels like he should maybe get involved in politics'. Instead, I just think that maybe he is jealous that I did jump in. I find it silly, because I respect his work." "Well, I think because a lot of people don't know why I'm a Republican, I came first of all from a socialistic country which is Austria and when I came over here in 1968 with the presidential elections coming up in November, I came over in October, I heard a lot of the press conferences from both of the candidates, [Hubert H. Humphrey] and [Richard Nixon], and Humphrey was talking about more government is the solution, protectionism, and everything he said about government involvement sounded to me more like Austrian socialism. Then when I heard Nixon talk about it, he said open up the borders, the consumers should be represented there ultimately and strengthen the military and get the government off our backs. I said to myself, 'What is this guy's party affiliation?' I didn't know anything at that point. So I asked my friend, 'What is Nixon?' He's a Republican. And I said, 'I am a Republican'. That's how I became a Republican." [On refusing to grant clemency to condemned killer Stanley Tookie Williams] "After studying the evidence, searching the history, listening to the arguments and wrestling with the profound consequences, I could find no justification for granting clemency. The facts do not justify overturning the jury's verdict, or the decisions of the courts in this case." [After undergoing heart surgery in 1997] "We made, actually, history, because it was the first time ever that doctors could prove that a lifelong Republican has a heart." "As a kid - as a kid I saw socialist - the socialist country that Austria became after the Soviets left. Now don't misunderstand me: I love Austria and I love the Austrian people. But I always knew that America was the place for me. In school, when the teacher would talk about America, I would daydream about coming here. I would daydream about living here. I would sit there and watch for hours American movies, transfixed by my heroes, like John Wayne. Everything about America -- Everything about America seemed so big to me, so open, so possible." "I have no sexual standards in my head that say this is good or this is bad. Homosexual - that only means to me that he enjoys sex with a man and I enjoy sex with a woman. It's all legitimate to me." "I didn't think about money. I thought about the fame, about just being the greatest. I was dreaming about being some dictator of a country or some savior like Jesus." "I'm 6' 2". I've heard rumors that I'm really much shorter in real life - like 5' 6" or something like that - which is ridiculous. I can assure you this is not the case. People look up to me, and not just because I do a lot of work in the community. I mean, most people really look up to me." "California will not wait for our federal government to take strong action on global warming. We won't wait for the federal government. We will move forward because we know it's the right thing to do. We will lead on this issue and we will get other western states involved. I think there's not great leadership from the federal government when it comes to protecting the environment." "Money doesn't make you happy. I now have $50 million but I was just as happy when I had $48 million." "I have to give the audiences what they enjoy seeing while I try to bring in a little something new, with different movies, different time periods and all those things. But what's important is to entertain the people -- everything else means nothing." (from a 1987 interview)

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