Quotable Quotes

Richard: He has a knife!

Eleanor: Of course he has a knife. He always has a knife. We all have knives. It's 1183 and we're barbarians.

-- The Lion in Winter

Said memory occasioned by Jim Henley's mention of the flick over at Unqualified Offerings. It's a great movie. There's another version, a TV take from 2003 which I haven't seen -- but let's be serious. I find it unlikely that Patrick Stewart, Glenn Close and Co. can hold a candle to Peter O'Toole, Katharine Hepburn, Anthony Hopkins (in his third film) and Timothy Dalton (in his second), even though the late playwright James Goldman was responsible for all three scripts (play, movie script and teleplay).

The rest of Eleanor's monologue (it's easy to miss after Hepburn's straight delivery of the barbarian line -- fortunately I've seen the movie enough times that I dont always end up curled in a fetal position in the corner trying to stop laughing before my intestines run for the exit -- but worth reproducing as well):

Oh, my piglets, we are the origins of war -- not history's forces, nor the times, nor justice, nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor kinds of government, nor any other thing.

We are the killers.

We breed wars.

We carry it like syphilis inside. Dead bodies rot in field and stream because the living ones are rotten.

For the love of God can't we love one another just a little?

That's how peace begins.

We have so much to love each other for.

We have such possibilities, my children.

We could change the world.

Selah.