Michael Moore Quotes

Middle class jobs prevent crime and violence.

The health insurance industry does not like to pay out claims, because they don't make money. The only way they can make a profit is if they don't pay for your operation. If they pay for your operation and your doctor's appointment and your pharmaceuticals, they don't make any money.

It should be a crime to make a profit off somebody being sick.

If you reduce the guns and the ammo, you'll reduce the murders.

I and you and everyone else has to be a political activist.

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.

If the guy out in the woods with the Michigan Militia is a real estate negotiator, instead of some crackpot, and has a normal life, that's unnerving. You don't want to think it's as normal as the guy next door, hedging his lawn. It's easier to demonize or separate them off from 'us.'

I've made a lot of enemies in all the right places, and there aren't enough hours in the day to respond to either the well-financed corporate hacks or the lowly stalkers who seek to libel me or make a buck off the fact that I'm a well-known person.

People of my age who went to college, go into college, you know what it cost back then? Nothing or next to nothing. At the most, you had to work at Dairy Queen during the summer and that would pay for your college education.

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

I'm not a pundit. I'm not an analyst. I don't want to participate in the existing debate that's going on about whether or not you should be able to have as many guns as you want to have or that guns are even the problem.

The money to fund great things and innovations and programs is gone in our lifetime; it's all gone to debt. So we won't be able to solve global warming or have the transportation that we needed for the 21st century. We should be supporting people with great ideas, but it's gone, and now it's gotta be paid back with interest to banks in China.

No decisions should ever be made without asking the question, is this for the common good?

Because I have an opinion, I have become public enemy number one to the Fox News Channel and the right wing.

A newspaper is a public trust, and we will suffer as a society without them. It is not the Internet that has killed them. It is their own greed, it is their own stupidity, and it is capitalism that has taken our daily newspapers from us.

I get called 'controversial' all the time.

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

If you could read, you knew shit.

How could a guy sitting in a cave in Afghanistan, have ... plotted so perfectly the hijacking of four planes and then guaranteed that three of them would end up precisely on their targets?

Librarians in America do something like a couple of billion dollars worth of book business every year.

I say stupid white men are always the problem. That's never going to change.

I'm caught up probably just as much in the consumer culture as the next person.

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 had a newspaper in Flint, Michigan called the 'Flint Voice,' and so it was a, you know, underground, alternative newspaper that I edited and put out for about ten years.

What the media are telling you to be afraid of are the wrong things ... Fear is a necessary ingredient of our survival instincts.

I may be preaching to the choir, but the choir needs a good song.

I don't want people leaving the theater depressed after my movies. I want them angry.

My uncle killed by sniper in WW2. We were taught snipers were cowards. Will shoot you in the back. Snipers aren't heroes. And invaders are worse.

Most Americans, in their heart, are liberal and progressive. It's just a small minority of people who hate, they hate, they exist in the politics of hate, they don't believe two consenting adults should have the right to be in love and share their lives together and be legally protected by the state,

Nobody was talking about healthcare until 'Sicko' came out.

People like me who grew up in a working-class town, who don't have a college education, you don't usually hear from us.

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.

Four hundred obscenely wealthy individuals, 400 little Mubaraks - most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion-dollar taxpayer bailout of 2008 - now have more cash, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined.

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

Back in the '80s and '90s, when GM was consistently posting giant profits, they were simultaneously firing tens of thousands of workers in my hometown of Flint and across Michigan.

There's no violence coming from the Occupy protesters.

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.

One day there'll be no need for me. I'm actually hoping to put myself out of business.

My dad was an autoworker, my mom was a clerk. Until I was thirty-five, I never made more than fifteen thousand dollars a year.

I've been encouraging documentary filmmakers to use more and more humor, and they're loath to do that because they think if it's a documentary it has to be deadly serious - it has to be like medicine that you're supposed to take. And I think it's what keeps the mass audience from going to documentaries.

If we don't participate in it, it ceases to be a democracy. So Obama will rise or fall based not so much on what he does but on what we do to support him.

Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.

'Zero Dark Thirty' is a disturbing, fantastically-made movie. It will make you hate torture.

So is there a difference between Democrats and Republicans? Sure. The Democrats say one thing ("Save the planet!") and then do another
quietly holding hands behind the scenes with the bastards who make this world a dirtier, meaner place. The Republicans just come right out and give the bastards a corner office in the West Wing. That's the difference.

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.

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?'

You know he's [George W. Bush] there illegally. You know he was not elected either by the popular vote or by the vote in Florida.

My film about Bush didn't prevent his reelection.

How about that McDonald's two blocks from Ground Zero? That's killed more people than the 19 hijackers.

Instead of the Government spending $400,000 on immunisation, we may get far better health outcomes if we spend $100,000 in some other way, on nutrition for example ... When you have an expenditure on getting your community healthier, then the resistance to many childhood diseases is stronger.

White people scare the crap out of me.

Fahrenheit 9/11: The temperature where freedom burns!

I drive an American car. It's a Chrysler. That's not an endorsement. It's more like a cry for pity.

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.

I've always felt so grateful that I dropped out of school, that I never had to do a thesis. I wouldn't know how to organise and structure myself to film so that B follows A and C follows B.

The vast majority of the guns in the U.S. are sold to white people who live in the suburbs or the country. When we fantasize about being mugged or home invaded, what's the image of the perpetrator in our heads? Is it the freckled-face kid from down the street - or is it someone who is, if not black, at least poor?

I hate to say it, but killing is our way. We began America with genocide, then built it with slaves. The shootings will continue. It's who we are.

I remember the first time I received a cassette tape of a band called The Clash. I became an instant fan of the Clash and then bought their albums after that and went to their concerts and gave them my money ... but I first got it for free.

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.

I want us all to face our fears and stop behaving like our goal in life is to merely survive. "Surviving" is for wimps and game show contestants stranded in the jungle or on a desert island. You are not stranded. You own the store ... You deserve better.

If I were a capitalist I would not give my employees health insurance with no deductible, which I do, including dental, and paid pregnancy leave. That's not called capitalism, that's called being a Christian and someone who believes in democracy, so that everyone should get a fair slice of the pie.

Three of the top six documentaries of all time, grossing, are made by me.

I don't believe that the Bush Administration had something to do with September 11th. I do believe that there were a lot of warning signals, but I don't think they were ignored on purpose - Bush just wanted to go to the ranch for a month.

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

Jesus told us that we would be judged by how we treat the least among us.

I certainly believe that I have no right to tell another couple whether they can or cannot be married.

Bush's presidency is revisionism-proof. We're going to be recovering from it for the rest of our lives.

I think people should start to practice the words 'President Romney.'

The left, liberals, believe that if we just have more gun control laws, all the problems are going to go away. Well, I don't think so. I don't think so. I think - yes, it will, it will be reduced. There's no question about that.

Nobody had a credit card when I was a kid. No one had credit card debt. But these big companies and banks wanted to know how to get more money out of people - get them charging things.

There should be no private health insurance companies operating for profit.

The majority of Americans, the ones who never elected George W. Bush, are not fooled by his weapons of mass distraction.

No one is entertained by economics.

Army Specialist Bradley Manning deserves a medal, not prison.

I realized that this was the big secret of democracy
that change can occur by starting off with just a few people doing something.

For my very first movie, 'Roger and Me,' I made it as part of my deal with Warner Brothers that the four people that were evicted in that film, that Warner Brothers would house - would pay their mortgage or their rent for the next two years to give them a chance to get on their feet.

We reward people for making money off money, and moving money around and dividing up mortgages a thousand times over, selling it to China ... and it becomes this shell game.

Diets are a scam.

I voted for the black guy, and what we got was the white guy

If anything, I don't have to convince the American public that we have a broken health-care system. I think the majority of Americans since they have to go through that health-care system, already know it.

I'm not a pundit. I'm not an analyst.

The economic system that the United States has is an evil empire. It's an economic system that's not fair, not just, and it's not democratic. And it will fall just like communism fell. The richest 1 percent now own 50 percent of the wealth. It didn't use to be that way. The average CEO 20 years ago made 20 times as much as the average employee. Now they make 212 times as much.

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.

Nothing seems crueler
or more ironic
than these upper crusters who never pay a dime for their high-priced shrinks or reflexology sessions to call those who just want that tumor removed from their uterus a bunch of commies. Well, the revolution is at hand and let's hope all those uninsured commies give the rich such a headache that a whole bottle of Advil won't be enough to take the pain way.

L.A. - talk about a cruel city: Patients are forcibly removed from hospitals.

Everybody gets sick; everybody has had a problem with insurance or the prescription drugs they're supposed to be taking or an elderly parent who needs care.

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

I'll tell you who doesn't have any personal responsibility. Companies like General Electric and others who pay absolutely no income tax.

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.

It turns out Cuba has this incredible healthcare system for a very poor country.

I don't want to do anything that violates my own personal code of ethics and morals.

I do believe that we are to love our enemies and do good to those who persecute you. I believe that there is power and strength in that.

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

[Bill] Clinton was a pretty good president for a Republican.

Documentaries are a form of journalism.

Halliburton is not a 'company' doing business in Iraq. It is a war profiteer, bilking millions from the pockets of average Americans. In past wars, they would have been arrested - or worse.

Comedy is a great slayer of rogues in power.

I still believe the lessons I learned when I was raised in a Roman Catholic household. Like, it's harder for a rich man to get into Heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.

The American media wants to pump you full of fear.

I'm a citizen in a democracy. To call me an activist would be redundant. It's not a spectator sport. If we all become non-participants, it no longer works.