The Condemned Movie Quotes

people had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, organized place. nobody realized how boring it would become. with the whole world property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and addressed and recorded. nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. on a roller coaster. at a movie. still, it would always be that kind of faux excitement. you know the dinosaurs aren't going to eat the kids. the test audiences have outvoted any chance of even a major faux disaster. and because there's no possibility of real disaster, real risk, we're left with no chance for real salvation. real elation. real excitement. Joy. Discovery. Invention. the laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom. without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace.

Great men speak secrets about themselves with nods and gestures, walking away from jokes about women rather than condemn the jokester; if with a woman, the turning of their head during a nude scene in a movie speaking volumes about their character without ever saying a word. It is a language foreign to women, but those that take the time to learn it find themselves knowing more about their man than by any other means.

The next time you feel a sense of dissatisfaction, of something being missing or not quite right, turn inward as an experiment. See if you can capture the energy of that very moment. Instead of picking up a magazine or going to the movies, calling a friend or looking for something to eat or acting up in one way or another, make a place for yourself. Sit down and enter into your breathing, if only for a few minutes. Don't look for anything - neither flowers not light nor a beautiful view. Don't extol the virtues of anything or condemn the inadequacy of anything. Don't even think to yourself, "I am going inward now." Just sit. Reside at the center of the world. Let things be as they are.

Movies do not change, but their viewers do. When I saw La Dolce Vita in 1960, I was an adolescent for whom “the sweet life” represented everything I dreamed of: sin, exotic European glamor, the weary romance of the cynical newspaperman. When I saw it again, around 1970, I was living in a version of Marcello’s world; Chicago’s North Avenue was not the Via Veneto, but at 3 a.m. the denizens were just as colorful, and I was about Marcello’s age. When I saw the movie around 1980, Marcello was the same age, but I was 10 years older, had stopped drinking, and saw him not as a role model but as a victim, condemned to an endless search for happiness that could never be found, not that way. By 1991, when I analyzed the film a frame at a time at the University of Colorado, Marcello seemed younger still, and while I had once admired and then criticized him, now I pitied and loved him. And when I saw the movie right after Mastroianni died, I thought that Fellini and Marcello had taken a moment of discovery and made it immortal.

The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom. Without access to true chaos, we’ll never have true peace. Unless everything can get worse, it won’t get any better. This is all stuff the Mommy used to tell him. She used to say, “The only frontier you have left is the world of intangibles. Everything else is sewn up too tight.” Caged inside too many laws. By intangibles, she meant the Internet, movies, music, stories, art, rumors, computer programs, anything that isn’t real. Virtual realities. Make-believe stuff. The culture. The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.

Fear and desire for pleasure. Aggressiveness comes out of fear, predominantly, and sexuality predominantly out of the other. But they mix in the middle. Anyway, both of these impulses can destroy order, which comes out of both drives, and which is another human need I haven't yet fit into my scheme. So both have to be controlled. But in fact, despite religious commands to the contrary, aggressiveness has never really been condemned. It's been exalted, from the Bible through Homer and Virgil right down to Humbert Hemingway. Have you ever heard of a John Wayne movie being censored? did you ever see them take war books off the bookstands? They leave the genitals off Barbie and Ken, but they manufacture every kind of war toy. Because sex is more threatening to us than aggression. There have been strict rules about sex since the beginning of written rules, and even before, if we can believe myth. I think that's because it's in sex that men feel most vulnerable. In war they can hype themselves up, or they have a weapon. Sex means being literally naked and exposing your feelings. And that's more terrifying to most men than the risk of dying while fighting a bear or a soldier. Look at the rules! You can have sex if you're married, and you have to marry a person of the opposite gender, the same color and religion, an age close to your own, of the right social and economic background, even the right height, for God's sake, or else everybody gets up in arms, they disinherit you or threaten not to come to the wedding or they make nasty cracks behind your back. Or worse, if you cross color or gender lines. And once you're married, you're supposed to do only certain things when you make love: the others all have nasty names. When after all, sex itself, in itself, is harmless, and aggression is harmful. Sex never hurt anyone.

I thought about the aftermath of the 1862 war, when thirty-eight hastily condemned warriors had been hung in Mankato, in the country's largest-ever mass execution. Their bodies were buried in shallow graves and then dug up for study by local doctors, including Dr. Mayo, who kept the body of Cut Nose for his personal examination. I thought about my father losing his teaching job, about his struggle with depression and drinking. About how angry he was that our history was not taught in schools. Instead, we had to battle sports mascots and stereotypes. Movie actors in brownface. Tourists with cameras. Welfare lines. Alcoholism. 'After stealing everything,' he would rage, 'now they want to blame us for it, too.' Social services broke up Native families, sending children like me to white foster parents. Every week, the newspapers ran stories about Indians who rolled their cars while drunk or the rise of crack cocaine on the reservations or somebody's arrest for gang-related crimes. No wonder so many Native kids were committing suicide. But there was so much more to the story of the run. What people didn't see because they chose never to look. Unlike the stone monument in New Ulm, built to memorialize the settlers' loss with angry pride, the Dakhota had created a living, breathing memorial that found healing in prayer and ceremony. What the two monuments shared, however, was remembering. We were all trying to find a way through grief.

Was that not the effect behind my daily reading of the paper? In their businesses and politics, their taverns, movies, assaults, divorces, murders, I tried continually to find clear signs of their common humanity. It was undeniably to, my interest to do this. Because I was involved with them; because, whether I liked it or not, they were my generation, my society, my world. We were figures in the same plot, eternally fixed together. I was aware, also, that their existence, just as it was, made mine possible. And if, as was often said, this part of the century was approaching the nether curve in a cycle, then I, too, would remain on the bottom and there, extinct, merely add my body, my life, to the base of a coming time. This would probably be a condemned age. But... it might be a mistake to think of it in that way. Mists faded and spread and faded on the pane as I breathed. Perhaps a mistake. And when I thought of the condemned ages and those unnamed, lying in their obscurity, I wondered. How did we know how it was? In all principal ways the human spirit must have been the same. Good apparently left fewer traces. And we were coming to know that we had misjudged whole epochs. Besides, the giants of the last century had their Liverpools and Londons, their Lilles and Hamburgs to contend against, as we have our Chicagos and Detroits. And there might be a chance that I was misled, even with these ruins before my eyes, sodden, themselves the color of the fateful paper that I read daily. I have spoken of an "invariable question." But the fact is that it had for many months been not in the least invariable. These were things I would have thought last winter, and now, in their troubled density, they served only to remind me of the sort of person I had been. For a long time "common humanity" and "bring myself to concede" had been completely absent from my mind. And all at once I saw how I had lapsed from that older self to whom they had been so natural.

There were years when I went to the movies almost every day, sometimes even twice a day, and they were the years between 1936 and the war, around the time of my adolescence. Those were years in which cinema was my world. It’s been said many times before that cinema is a form of escape, it’s a stock phrase intended to be a condemnation, and cinema certainly served that purpose for me back then. It satisfied a need for disorientation, for shifting my attention to another place, and I believe it’s a need that corresponds to a primary function of integration in the world, an essential phase in any kind of development. Of course there are other more substantial and personal ways of creating a different space for yourself: cinema was the easiest method and it was within reach, but it was also the one that instantly carried me farthest away. I went to the cinema in the afternoon, secretly fleeing from home, or using study with a classmate as an excuse, because my parents left me very little freedom during the months when school was in session. The urge to hide inside the cinema as soon as it opened at two in the afternoon was the proof of true passion. Attending the first screening had a number of advantages: the half-empty theater, it was like I had it all to myself, would allow me to stretch out in the middle of the third row with my legs on the back of the seat in front of me; the hope of returning home without anyone finding out about my escape, in order to receive permission to go out once again later on (and maybe see another film); a light daze for the rest of the afternoon, detrimental to studying but advantageous for daydreaming. And in addition to these explanations that were unmentionable for various reasons, there was another more serious one: entering right when it opened guaranteed the rare privilege of seeing the movie from the beginning and not from a random moment toward the middle or the end, because that was what usually happened when I got to the cinema later in the afternoon or toward the evening.

When someone goes to the doctor and says, “I hear a voice in my head,” he or she will most likely be sent to a psychiatrist. The fact is that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought processes that you don’t realize you have the power to stop. Continuous monologues or dialogues. You have probably come across “mad” people in the street incessantly talking or muttering to themselves. Well, that’s not much different from what you and all other “normal” people do, except that you don’t do it out loud. The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn’t necessarily relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations. Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images or “mental movies.” Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person’s own worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease. The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by “watching the thinker,” which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence. When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You’ll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.

FREEING YOURSELF FROM YOUR MIND What exactly do you mean by “watching the thinker”? When someone goes to the doctor and says, “I hear a voice in my head,” he or she will most likely be sent to a psychiatrist. The fact is that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought processes that you don’t realize you have the power to stop. Continuous monologues or dialogues. You have probably come across “mad” people in the street incessantly talking or muttering to themselves. Well, that’s not much different from what you and all other “normal” people do, except that you don’t do it out loud. The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn’t necessarily relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations. Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images or “mental movies.” Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person’s own worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease. The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by “watching the thinker,” which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence. When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You’ll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.

The only thing I knew about pickups was this: growing up, I always inwardly mocked the couples I saw who drove around in them. The girl would be sitting in the middle seat right next to the boy, and the boy’s right arm would be around her shoulders, and his left arm would be on the wheel. I’m not sure why, but there was something about my golf course upbringing that had always caused me to recoil at this sight. Why is she sitting in the middle seat? I’d wonder. Why is it important that they press against each other as they drive down the road? Can’t they wait until they get home? I looked at it as a sign of weakness--something pitiable. They need to get a life may have even crossed my mind once or twice, as if their specific brand of public affection was somehow directly harming me. But that’s what happens to people who, by virtue of the geography of their childhood, are deprived of the opportunity to ride in pickup trucks. They become really, really judgmental about otherwise benign things. Still, every now and then, as Marlboro Man showed me the beauty of the country in his white Ford F250, I couldn’t help but wonder…had he been one of those boys in high school? I knew he’d had a serious girlfriend back in his teenage years. Julie. A beautiful girl and the love of his adolescent life, in the same way Kev had been mine. And I wondered: had Julie scooched over to the middle seat when Marlboro Man picked her up every Friday night? Had he hooked his right arm around her neck, and had she then reached her left hand up and clasped his right hand with hers? Had they then dragged Main in this position? Our hometowns had been only forty miles apart; maybe he’d brought her to my city to see a movie. Was it remotely possible I’d actually seen Marlboro Man and Julie riding around in his pickup, sitting side by side? Was it possible this man, this beautiful, miraculous, perfect man who’d dropped so magically into my life, had actually been one of the innocent recipients of my intolerant, shallow pickup-related condemnation? And if he had done it, was it something he’d merely grown out of? How come I wasn’t riding around in his middle seat? Was I supposed to initiate this? Was this expected of me? Because I probably should know early on. But wouldn’t he have gestured in that direction if he’d wanted me to move over and sit next to him? Maybe, just maybe, he’d liked those girls better than he liked me. Maybe they’d had a closeness that warranted their riding side by side in a pickup, a closeness that he and I just don’t share? Please don’t let that be the reason. I don’t like that reason. I had to ask him. I had to know.

On a gray afternoon I sit in a silent room and contemplate din. In the street a single car passes - a rapid bass vowel - and then it is quiet again. So what is this uproar, this hubbub, this heaving rumble of zigzag static I keep hearing? This echo chamber spooling out spirals of chaos? An unmistakable noise as clearly mine as fingerprint or twist of DNA: the thrum of regret, of memory, of defeat, of mutability, of bitter fear, made up of shame and ambition and anger and vanity and wishing. The soundtrack of a movie of the future, an anticipatory ribbon of scenes long dreaded, of daydreams without a prayer of materializing. Or else: the replay of unforgotten conversations, humiliating, awkward, indelible. Mainly it is the buzz of the inescapably mundane, the little daily voice that insists and insists: right now, not now, too late, too soon, why not, better not, turn it on, turn it off, notice this, notice that, be sure to take care of, remember not to. The nonstop chatter that gossips, worries, envies, invokes, yearns, condemns, self-condemns.

Nudity in art was rarely contested by the church until recently. It was not explicitly condemned until the anti-Protestant Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, and even after the Reformation, the Protestant church continued to support artistic uses of nudity, especially when depicting biblical scenes that might demand it for accuracy.

Because of monster movies and stereotypical witch stories, many people who do not condemn witchcraft to the realm of nonsense think that there is a monster or demon hiding behind every corner waiting to get them. Magick tends to amplify the intentions given to it. If you learn centeredness, confidence, and compassion, magick will amplify those qualities, rather than your fears. Protection magick and psychic self-defense skills alleviate your fears and bring balance.

Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, which showed the darker side of American society, was one example of the banned book, while samurai movies were among the 236 films condemned by Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers as feudalistic and militaristic. Alle reference do SCAP's involvement in government reforms were also prohibited.

More was condemned to the chopping block. His execution took place in 1535 at Tower Hill. His last words, as he stood on the scaffold, were “I die the king’s good servant but God’s first.” These words became so famous that they were made into a movie more than four centuries later. To this day no one can remember the last words of Henry VIII, and deservedly so.