Top 125 Michael Moore Quotes

All I ask is that you not be naive about how the government works when it decides to go after its prey.

Wall Street, the banks, and corporate America, has been able to call the shots here. They control our members of Congress and they get what they want.

I respect the fact that people have worked hard all week and want to go to the movies on the weekend and be entertained.

Occupy has to continue as a bold, in-your-face movement – occupying banks, corporate headquarters, board meetings, campuses and Wall Street itself. We need weekly – if not daily – nonviolent assaults right on Wall Street.

I don’t even like DVDs. Honest to God, in my lifetime, I might have rented a dozen DVDs, literally gone into a video store and rented a dozen DVDs in my lifetime, because I don’t like to see movies that way. I like to see them on the big screen.

There’s nothing inherently or patently wrong with anybody who does well, works hard, earns a living, betters themselves. I’m not against any of these things. It’s about how you make that money, and then what you do with it.

I – honestly, I don’t know of a worse lie one could tell other than a lie to take a country to war. To make up things to take people to war. That’s just got to be the most obscene, immoral thing to do.

You need to have a relationship with what you put inside you. I don’t want to get all spiritual about this, but I believe our bodies are a gift, and to deface it is disrespectful.

Since 9/11, the Bush administration has used that tragic event as a justification to rip up our constitution and our civil liberties. And I honestly believe that one or two 9/11s, and martial law will be declared in our country and we’re inching towards a police state.

No 22-year-old should have to enter the real world already in a virtual debtors’ prison.

It’s not surprising to me that in a country born of racial genocide, the issue of race is still an open wound on the American soul. We haven’t dealt with it.

I’m not a big believer in our copyright laws; I find them way too restrictive.

White people scare the crap out of me.

The products built in the factories of G.M., Ford and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps.

If there ever is a struggle, making a good movie will always supersede the need to be noble.

Politicians never keep all their promises.

I don’t compromise my values and I don’t compromise my work. That’s why I’ve been kicked from one network to the next: I won’t give in.

I made ‘Bowling for Columbine’ in the hope the school shootings would stop and that we would address the issue of how easy it is to get a gun in the United States, and tragically, those school shootings continue.

I don’t ‘support the troops’ or any of those other hollow and hypocritical platitudes uttered by Republicans and frightened Democrats. Here’s what I do support: I support them coming home. I support them being treated well.

I was taught from a very early age that it was probably the most American thing you can do is to question what’s going on and to try to fix things that you see that aren’t right. I believed that as a young person, and I believe that today.

I’m used to my films having little effect on making the world a better place.

Most Americans are very responsible.

I take much of the attacks and the criticism toward me as being very class-based, but as Americans we don’t like to acknowledge that reality.

I have enormous respect for anyone who would offer to sacrifice their life to defend my right to live. Is there any greater gift one can give another?

All art is about appealing to emotion.

I’m a highly flawed individual, as we all are, and because I was raised by Jesuits, I’m constantly, ‘What is it about me and what I can do to be better?’

Middle class jobs prevent crime and violence.

Diets are a scam.

‘Champagne’ and ‘breathmint’ are the first two words all Oscar winners hear.

The motivation for war is simple. The U.S. government started the war with Iraq in order to make it easy for U.S. corporations to do business in other countries. They intend to use cheap labor in those countries, which will make Americans rich.

This book, ‘Stupid White Men,’ has sold now over four million copies worldwide. Probably about half of that may be in the U.S. and Canada, and the rest, overseas.

Under Reagan came the idea of putting your pension plan in the stock market, which wasn’t a guaranteed pension.

There is nowhere in the four Gospels where Jesus uses the word ‘homosexual.’

Healthcare should be between the doctor and the patient. And if the doctor says something needs to be done, the government should guarantee it gets paid for.

If one job doesn’t pay all the bills, don’t worry. You can get another one and another one and another one.

I don’t talk in sound bites.

I mean if politics was my main motivation I would be doing politics. But I’m a filmmaker.

As you have fewer and fewer voices in a democracy, in a free society, it’s not good to limit the number of voices.

The movie theater is never going away. If that was a case why are there still restaurants? People still have kitchens in their home!

For a documentary filmmaker, I do very well.

I think movies are too long.

The Justice Department needs to investigate how Goldman Sachs was able to steer things in such a manner through their former employees in the Bush administration, so that in the end Goldman’s competitors have disappeared and Goldman is left standing.

I think there are few things more patriotic than taking the time to make your country a better place.

The American media wants to pump you full of fear.

I’m a religious fanatic? Yes, I am, actually.

Many criminals believe what they say is true; they could pass a lie detector test.

Capitalism is against the things that we say we believe in – democracy, freedom of choice, fairness. It’s not about any of those things now. It’s about protecting the wealthy and legalizing greed.

You do not have the right to take another human’s life, unless it’s in strict self-defense.

Listen friends, you have to face the truth: You are never going to be rich… The system is rigged in favor of the few, and your name is not among them, not now and not ever.

Greed has been with human beings forever. We have a number of things in our species that you would call ‘the dark side,’ and greed is one of them. If you don’t put certain structures in place or restrictions on those parts of our being that come from that dark place, then it gets out of control.

Our laws demand that a corporation have a fiduciary responsibility with shareholders to maximize profits. They are legally required to make as much money as possible, any way possible within ‘the law.’

Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil. You have to eliminate it and replace it with something that is good for all people and that something is democracy.

I’m actually a fairly conservative person. I live a very conservative lifestyle.

Sometimes it’s important to vote – you know, to make a statement, to make a point; certainly, many of us who were involved in the Nader campaign in 2000 felt that way.

Most people don’t see themselves as Democrats or Republicans. They see themselves as Americans.

Before there were unions, there was no middle class.

The upper 1 percent, the people down on Wall Street, the corporate executives, they’re the people that control this economy.

There’s a gullible side to the American people. They can be easily misled. Religion is the best device used to mislead them.

We should all spend some time of our life doing service to our country. To me, I would give up a couple of years.

You know we are flawed people, so if someone is going to make a movie about me, they don’t have to make it up. My real flaws are much funnier.

Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil.

Republicans are relentless and they’re smart, too – they’re not all dumb – and on Election Day, they’ll be up at five in the morning.

I’ve always been sort of confused by the trajectory my life has taken. I was supposed to be on an assembly line building Buicks.

New York City has become a place where it’s not easy for the working class to even live.

Transporting Americans is and should be one of the most important functions our government must address.

The media love to cover black people on the front page. After all, when you live in a society that will lock up about 30 percent of all black men at some time in their lives and send more of them to prison than to college, chances are a fair number of those black faces will end up in the newspaper.

Should such an ignorant people lead the world? How did it come to this in the first place? 82 percent of us don’t even have a passport! Just a handful can speak a language other than English.

Every fact in my films is true. And yet how often do I have to read over and over again about supposed falsehoods?

I did a filmstrip on pollution in the Davison area as my Eagle Scout project and showed it around town. Businesses who were the polluters were mad at me.