Bridge On The River Kwai Quotes

Those who saw the famous film The Bridge on the River Kwai will remember the absurd zeal with which the English officer, prisoner of the Japanese, strives to build an audacious wooden bridge for them and is shocked when he realizes that the English sappers have mined it. So you see, love for a job well done is a deeply ambiguous virtue.

Maybe he was what Lucian would have turned out to be if the old sheriff hadn't have lived in such interesting times. A couple of years in a Japanese prison camp might be just what Turk needed. But I didn't have a bridge over the river Kwai for him to build so we had to settle for Powder Junction.

The best man day in the world would involve building a bridge and then blowing up that bridge. Which is why you can't make a better man movie than The Bridge on the River Kwai, unless you make Two Bridges on the River Kwai.

War was terrible and terrifying - blood, death, torture, blitz, camps. But if you watched the films they made, The Great Escape, The Bridge on the River Kwai, it seemed it was possible for war to be a chance for heroism and medal winning.

Be happy in your work" -- Colonel Saito, Bridge on the River Kwai.

The building of the bridge on the river Kwai took a terrible toll on us and the depiction of our sufferings in the film of the same name was a very, very sanitised version of events.

Why is it that one of the best songs in the world has to be written by the BeeGees?" Benedict

Freud saw that when it comes to enemies and strangers, the ego can consign them to the limbo of death without even a second thought. Modern man lives in illusion, said Freud, because he denies or suppresses his wish for the other's death and for his own immortality; and it is precisely because of this illusion that mankind cannot get control over social evils like war. This is what makes war irrational: each person has the same hidden problem, and as antagonists obsessively work their cross purposes, the result is truly demonic; the film The Bridge on the River Kwai summed this up beautifully. Not only enemies but even friends and loved ones are fair fuel for our own perpetuation, said Freud: "In our unconscious we daily and hourly deport all who stand in our way, all who have offended or injured us." This is the price of our natural animal narcissism; very few of us, if pressured, would be unwilling to sacrfiice someone else in our place. The exception to this is of course the hero. We admire him precisely because he is willing to give his life for others instead of taking theirs for his. Heroism is an unusual reversal of routine values, and it is another thing that makes war so uplifting, as mankind has long known: war is a ritual for the emergence of heroes, and so for the transmutation of common, selfish values. In war men live their own ennbolement. But what we are reluctant to admit is that the admiration of the hero is a vicarious catharsis of our own fears, fears that are deeply hidden; and this is what plunges us into uncritical hero worship: what the hero does seems so superlative to us. Thus from another point of view we see how right Freud was on enslavement by our illusions based on our repressions.