Stanley Kubrick Men Quotations

The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning.

Man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved-that about sums it up. I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure.

One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential that one man make a film.

Shooting a movie is the worst milieu for creative work ever devised by man.

No philosophy based on an incorrect view of the nature of man is likely to produce social good.

Like the man said, can happiness buy money?

Some people demand a five-line capsule summary. Something you'd read in a magazine. They want you to say, 'This is the story of the duality of man and the duplicity of governments.' I hear people try to do it -- give the five-line summary -- but if a film has any substance or subtlety, whatever you say is never complete, it's usually wrong, and it's necessarily simplistic: truth is too multifaceted to be contained in a five-line summary. If the work is good, what you say about it is usually irrelevant.

The very meaningless of life forces man to create his own meanings. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space? ...

I'm just an old man and I smell bad, remember?

You're constantly changing man. But the film's not changing. The film stays the same. That's the beautiful aspect of it.