Hal Holbrook Quotes

We don't have truth delivered to us very often, especially in this very commercialized world.

There's no good guys and bad guys.

[Mark] Twain is pointing at you. You, the reader of the book one hundred and thirty years ago and today. That is what has made it a great American novel and the most widely read book in American Literature around the world today.

Success is no longer content. It's how it sells.

I walked the streets of New York for two years begging for a job, and I couldn't get one.

This is a deep and personal topic in our society today. Read the papers. America is hurting because of it. For God's sake, speak up. Don't we need to learn respect for people's feelings? What is going to school for? To learn how to add?

I don't play golf. Mark Twain is golf to me.

You can go into Mark Twain's material and prove anything you want. He was against war. He was for war. He was against rich people and he was for them. He was a kaleidoscope.

Mark Twain married the daughter of one of New York State's leading Abolitionists, Jervis Langdon, who helped Frederick Douglass who became the great Negro leader to escape from slavery.

We live in a democracy. We have this extraordinary opportunity to use our mind and say what we think, speak as we think. Sometimes what we say is objectionable to other people. But that is part of a free society.

I developed a resistance to authority. Not to discipline - I learned that. But to authority. I like to think for myself. And I like to cause trouble.

Lobbyists in Washington are making six figure salaries selling our government out to the corporate interests and we just sit and smile as if nothing is happening while the poor folks are getting poorer and their pharmaceutical bills rise.

Why do I keep performing at my age? What else am I going to do? Play golf? I tried that years ago and all I did was cuss. I can do that without the walk, cuss at Congress and let [Mark]Twain do it. "Imagine that you were an idiot. And then imagine that you were a member of Congress. Wait - I've repeated myself."

I tended to lean toward character work. I love to disguise myself.

To communicate with each other, we got to get mad at each other sometimes.

If we want to understand the actions of a man in the early 1860's, put yourself back there in his shoes. As a young man he began piloting steamboats on the Mississippi, a job he loved and wanted to do the rest of his life, he said. The Civil War ended traffic on the River and his job. He wrote about it in A History of A Campaign That Failed. He said: "I joined the Confederacy, served for two weeks, deserted, and the Confederacy fell." His attachment to the Southern ideal of slavery does not appear very sturdy.

What are we going to do about the injuries to our country still going on right in front of our eyes? It gets me out of bed in the morning. It makes me mad enough to get my blood up and want to get out there with [Mark] Twain and get it said and that is why I still hit the road and go out on the stage and keep working at staying alive.

Please don't refer to me as "channeling Mark Twain." I'm an actor. Not a channeler. That word is an iPhone shortcut. Acting is more eloquent than that.

There was so much to learn and it was all fun. But the best part was getting a laugh from an audience. That was like drowning in candy.

Politics has become incendiary. People don't find it so funny now so I have to be careful, but I have to wake them up with some truths and the truths I aim at them are over 100 years old. Facts that no one can dispute.

[Mark] Twain called Congress "the only distinctly native criminal class in America. We've lately sent a United States Senator to the penitentiary." That was a fact.

One of the problems with putting Huck Finn into a movie or on the stage is, you always make the white people stupid and racist. The point is, they don't know they're racist.