"I never trust a man that doesn't drink." At Harvard in 1974, on being asked whether then-President Richard Nixon ever advised him on the making of his films: "No, they've all been successful." "Oscar and I have something in common. Oscar first came to the Hollywood scene in 1928. So did I. We're both a little weatherbeaten, but we're still here an plan to be around for a whole lot longer." - on presenting the Best Picture Oscar in 1979 "When people say a John Wayne picture got bad reviews, I always wonder if they know it's a redundant sentence, but hell, I don't care. People like my pictures and that's all that counts." (When asked if he believed in God) "There must be some higher power or how else does all this stuff work?" "I would like to be remembered, well...the Mexicans have a phrase, 'Feo fuerte y formal'. Which means; he was ugly, strong and had dignity." (Time Magazine interview, 1969) "The sky is blue, the grass is green. Get off your ass and join the Marines." (Poem, "The Sky", he read on his 1969 "_Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In" (1968)_ appearance) "Talk low, talk slow, and don't say too much." "If I'd known this was all it would take, I'd have put that eyepatch on 40 years ago." - Upon accepting his Oscar for True Grit. "I'm an American actor. I work with my clothes on. I have to. Riding a horse can be pretty tough on your legs and elsewheres." [On Native Americans:] "I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves." "When I started, I knew I was no actor and I went to work on this Wayne thing. It was as deliberate a projection as you'll ever see. I figured I needed a gimmick, so I dreamed up the drawl, the squint and a way of moving meant to suggest that I wasn't looking for trouble but would just as soon throw a bottle at your head as not. I practiced in front of a mirror." "Communism is quite obviously still a threat. Yes, they are human beings, with a right to their point of view... but you ce On being asked about his "phony hair" at Harvard in 1974, "It's not phony. It's real hair. Of course, it's not mine, but it's real." "I never had a goddamn artistic problem in my life, never, and I've worked with the best of them. John Ford isn't exactly a bum, is he? Yet he never gave me any manure about art. He just made movies and that's what I do." "God-damn, I'm the stuff men are made of!" "I was overwhelmed by the feeling of friendship, comradeship, and brotherhood... DeMolay will always hold a deep spot in my heart." [On the Oscars] "You can't eat awards -- nor, more to the point, drink 'em." "I made up my mind that I was going to play a real man to the best of my ability. I felt many of the Western stars of the twenties and thirties were too goddamn perfect. They never drank or smoked. They never wanted to go to bed with a beautiful girl. They never had a fight. A heavy might throw a chair at them, and they just looked surprised and didn't fight in this spirit. They were too goddamn sweet and pure to be dirty fighters. Well, I wanted to be a dirty fighter if that was the only way to fight back. If someone throws a chair at you, hell, you pick up a chair and belt him right back. I was trying to play a man who gets dirty, who sweats sometimes, who enjoys kissing a gal he likes, who gets angry, who fights clean whenever possible but will fight dirty if he has to. You could say I made the Western hero a roughneck." "I can tell you why I love her. I have a lust for her dignity. I look at her wonderfully classic face, and I see hidden in it a sense of humor that I love. I think of wonderful, exciting, decent things when I look at her...." "Courage is being scared to death - and saddling up anyway." "I stick to simple themes. Love. Hate. No nuances. I stay away from psychoanalyst's couch scenes. Couches are good for one thing." "Every country in the world loved the folklore of the West - the music, the dress, the excitement, everything that was associated with the opening of a new territory. It took everybody out of their own little world. The cowboy lasted a hundred years, created more songs and prose and poetry than any other folk figure. The closest thing was the Japanese samurai. Now, I wonder who'll continue it." "I am a demonstrative man, a baby picker-upper, a hugger and a kisser - that's my nature." "I don't act...... I react." "I have found a certain type calls himself a Liberal...Now I always thought I was a Liberal. I came up terribly surprised one time when I found out that I was a Right-Wing Conservative Extremist, when I listened to everybody's point of view that I ever met, and then decided how I should feel. But this so-called new Liberal group, Jesus, they never listen to your point of view..." "There's been a lot of stories about how I got to be called Duke. One was that I played the part of a duke in a school play--which I never did. Sometimes, they even said I was descended from royalty! It was all a lot of rubbish. Hell, the truth is that I was named after a dog!" "Westerns are closer to art than anything else in the motion picture business" "We must always look to the future. Tomorrow - the time that gives a man just one more chance - is one of the many things that I feel are wonderful in life. So's a good horse under you. Or the only campfire for miles around. Or a quiet night and a nice soft hunk of ground to sleep on. A mother meeting her first-born. The sound of a kid calling you dad for the first time. There's a lot of things great about life. But I think tomorrow is the most important thing. Comes in to us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday." "I do not want the government to take away my human dignity and insure me anything more than a normal security. I don't want handouts." "I don't think a fella should be able to sit on his backside and receive welfare. I'd like to know why well-educated idiots keep apologizing for lazy and complaining people who think the world owes them a living." "I want to play a real man in all my films, and I define manhood simply: men should be tough, fair, and courageous, never petty, never looking for a fight, but never backing down from one either." "I don't want ever to appear in a film that would embarrass a viewer. A man can take his wife, mother, and his daughter to one of my movies and never be ashamed or embarrassed for going." "I am an old-fashioned, honest-to-goodness, flag-waving patriot." "It's kind of a sad thing when a normal love of country makes you a superpatriot." "You can't whine and bellyache because somebody else got a good break and you didn't." "I think that the loud roar of irresponsible liberalism. . . . is being quieted down by a reasoning public. I think the pendulum is swinging back. We're remembering that the past can't be so bad. We built a nation on it. We have to look to tomorrow." "Very few of the so-called liberals are open-minded. . . . They shout you down and won't let you speak if you disagree with them" "Some people tell me everything isn't black and white. But I say why the hell not?" "High Noon was the most un-American thing I have ever seen in my whole life. The last thing in the picture is ole Coop putting the United States marshal's badge under his foot and stepping on it. I'll never regret having run [Carl] Foreman out of this country." "I play John Wayne in pretty much every film I do, and I've done pretty well so far, haven't I?" "God, how I hate solemn funerals. When I die, take me into a room and burn me. Then my family and a few good friends should get together, have a few good belts, and talk about the crazy old time we all had together." "I've always had deep faith that there is a Supreme Being, there has to be. To me that's just a normal thing to have that kind of faith. The fact that He's let me stick me around a little longer, or She's let me stick around a little longer, certainly goes great with me --- and I want to hang around as long as I'm healthy and not in anybody's way." "I have tried to live my life so that my family would love me and my friends respect me. The others can do whatever the hell they please." "My problem is that I'm not a handsome man like Cary Grant ... who will be handsome at sixty-five. I may be able to do a few more man-woman things before it's too late, but then what? I never want to play silly old men chasing young girls, as some of the stars are doing. I have to be a director - I've waited all these years to be one. The Alamo will tell what my future is." "Oscar and I have something in common. Oscar first came to Hollywood scene in 1928. So did I. We're both a little weatherbeaten, but we're still here and plan to be around for a whole lot longer." [His speech at the 1979 Academy Awards ceremony] "When I saw what our boys are going through - hell - and how the morale was holding up, and the job they were doing, I just knew they had to make this picture." [On The Green Berets] "Sure I wave the American flag. Do you know a better flag to wave? Sure I love my country with all her faults. I'm not ashamed of that, never have been, never will be. I was proud when President Nixon ordered the mining of Haiphong Harbor, which we should have done long ago, because I think we're helping a brave little country defend herself against Communist invasion. That's what I tried to show in _Green Berets, The (1968)_ and I took plenty of abuse from the critics. Did you ever see reviews like that? Reviews with hatred and nastiness." "I'm quite sure that the concept of a Government-run reservation would have an ill effect on anyone. But that seems to be what the socialists are working for now - to have everyone cared for from cradle to grave." "This may come as a surprise to you, but I wasn't alive when reservations were created - even if I do look that old. I have no idea what the best method of dealing with the Indians in the 1800's would have been. Our forefathers evidently thought they were doing the right thing." "I'm not going to give you those I-was-a-poor-boy-and-I-pulled-myself-up-by-my- bootstraps-stories, but I've gone without a meal or two in my lifetime, and I still don't expect the Government to turn over any of it's territory to me. Hard times aren't something I can blame my fellow citizens for. Years ago, I didn't have all the opportunities, either. But you can't whine and bellyache 'cause somebody else got a good break and you didn't, like these Indians are. We'll all be on a reservation soon if the socialists keep subsidizing groups like them with our tax money." "Look, I'm sure there have been inequalities. If those inequalities are presently affecting any of the Indians now alive, they have a right to a court hearing. But what happened one hundred years ago in out country can't be blamed on us today." Asked whether the Native American Indians should be allowed to camp on their land at Alcatraz: "Well, I don't know of anybody else who wants it. The fellas who were taken off it sure don't want to go back there, including the guards. So as far as I am concerned, I think we ought to make a deal with the Indians. They should pay as much for Alcatraz as we paid them for Manhattan. I hope they haven't been careless with their wampum." [On Superman star Christopher Reeve after meeting him at the 1979 Academy Awards]: "This is our new man. He's taking over." "I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to the point of responsibility. I don't believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people." "Have you ever heard of some fellows who first came over to this country? You know what they found? They found a howling wilderness, with summers too hot and winters freezing, and they also found some unpleasant little characters who painted their faces. Do you think these pioneers filled out form number X6277 and sent in a report saying the Indians were a little unreasonable? Did they have insurance for their old age, for their crops, for their homes? They did not! They looked at the land, and the forest, and the rivers. They looked at their wives, their kids and their houses, and then they looked up at the sky and they said, 'Thanks God, we'll take it from here.'" "Any man who'd make an X-rated movie ought to have to take his daughter to see it." "Don't ever for a minute make the mistake of looking down your nose at westerns. They're art--the good ones, I mean. They deal in life and sudden death and primitive struggle, and with the basic emotions--love, hate, and anger--thrown in. We'll have westerns films as long as the cameras keep turning. The fascination that the Old West has will never die. And as long as people want to pay money to see me act, I'll keep on making westerns until the day I die." "If it hadn't been for football and the fact I got my leg broke and had to go into the movies to eat, why, who knows, I might have turned out to be a liberal Democrat." Asked why he never wrote an autobiography: "Those who like me already know me, and those who don't like me wouldn't want to read about me anyway." "I don't think John Ford had any kind of respect for me as an actor until I made Red River for Howard Hawks. I was never quite sure what he did think of me as an actor. I know now though. Because when I finally won an Oscar for my role as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit, Ford shook my hand and said the award was long overdue me as far as he was concerned. Right then, I knew he'd respected me as an actor since Stagecoach, even though he hadn't let me know it. He later told me his praise earlier, might have gone to my head and made me conceited, and that was why he'd never said anything to me, until the right time." "I play John Wayne in every picture regardless of the character, and I've been doing all right, haven't I?" "Talk low, talk slow and don't talk too much." "That little clique back there in the East has taken great personal satisfaction reviewing my politics instead of my pictures. But one day those doctrinaire liberals will wake up to find the pendulum has swung the other way." "I was 32nd in the box office polls when I accepted the presidency of the Alliance. When I left office eight years later, somehow the folks who buy the tickets had made me number one." "I'd like to take that little dago son of a bitch and tear him into a million pieces and throw him into the ocean and watch him float back to Sicily where he belongs." - On Frank Capra "Television has a tendency to reach a little. In their westerns, they are getting away from the simplicity and the fact that those men were fighting the elements and the rawness of nature and didn't have time for this couch-work." "Mine is a rebellion against the monotony of life. The rebellion in these kids, particularly the S.D.S.'ers and those groups, seems to be a kind of dissension by rote." "Just think of it. At the Alamo there was a band of only one hundred and eighty-five men of many nationalities and religions, all joined in a common cause for freedom. Those one hundred and eighty-five men killed a thousand of Santa Anna's men before they died. But they knew they spent their lives for the precious time Sam Houston needed." "If it is for the FBI, I will do anything for them. If they want me to I will even be photographed with an agent and point out a Communist for them. Tell Mr Hoover I am on his side." - On Hollywood blacklisting "Every country in the world loved the folklore of the West--the music, the dress, the excitement, everything that was associated with the opening of a new territory. It took everybody out of their own little world. The cowboy lasted a hundred years, created more songs and prose and poetry than any other folk figure. The closest thing was the Japanese samurai. Now, I wonder who'll continue it." "I can tell you why I love her. I have a lust for her dignity. I look at her wonderfully classic face, and I see hidden in it a sense of humor that I love. I think of wonderful, exciting, decent things when I look at her." - On America "You know, I hear everybody talking about the generation gap. Frankly, sometimes I don't know what they're talking about. Heck, by now I should know a little bit about it, if I'm ever going to. I have seven kids and eighteen grandkids and I don't seem to have any trouble talking to any of them. Never have had, and I don't intend to start now."