The Manchurian Candidate Quotes

“Raymond stood as though someone might have just opened a beach umbrella in his bowels.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“Amateur psychiatric prognosis can be fascinating when there is absolutely nothing else to do.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“Iselin is a man who shall forever stand guard at the door of the mind to protect the people of this great nation from facts.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“Without the consciousness of guilt, existence had become so bland in Paradise that Eve welcomed the pungency of Original Sin.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“So saved are all those who enable themselves to believe, and therefore was the military mind called a juvenile mind. It was constant; it observed a code of honor in a world where any element of devotion to a rationale summoned scorn but the world itself knew itself was sick.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“Senator Jordan’s only response had been made upon a single mimeographed sheet holding a single sentence. Distributed to all press agencies, it said: “How long will you let this man use you and trick you?” Senator”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“Her ambition was an extremely distressing condition. She sought power the way a superstitious man might look for a four-leaf clover.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“He felt the sadness of Lucifer.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“Iselinism has developed a process for compounding a lie, then squaring it, which is a modern miracle of dishonesty far exceeding the claims of filter cigarettes. Iselin’s lies seem to have atomic motors within them, tiny reactors of such power and such complexity as to confound and baffle all with direct, and even slightly honest, turns of mind. He has bellowed out so many accusations about so many different people (and for all the public knows these names he brandishes may have been attached to people of entirely questionable existence) that no one can keep the records of these horrendous charges straight. Iselin is a man who shall forever stand guard at the door of the mind to protect the people of this great nation from facts.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“The conception of people acting against their own best interests should not startle us. We see it occasionally in sleep-walking and in politics, every day.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“The resentful man is a human with the capacity for affection so poorly developed that his understanding for the motives of others very nearly does not exist.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“LET US STOP IMITATING!!! Piracy and imitations of designs hamper the development and expansion of export trade. It is regrettable that there are quite a few cases of piracy in the People's Republic. Piracy injures the Chinese people's international prestige, causes the boycott of Chinese goods, and makes Chinese designers lose interest in making creative efforts.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“DUNDEE: Still, his mother manufactured Raymond.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“It was Christmas Eve. Raymond had invited Marco for dinner, telephoning him from the office to say that he had given Chunjin the night off and that Chunjin had resisted. Marco said that was because Chunjin was undoubtedly a Buddhist and not a celebrant at Christmas.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“Do you mind cigar smoke,” he mumbled. “Not at all,” she murmured. He turned away from her but made no move to find a cigar. “Go ahead,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I wish you’d smoke two cigars at the same time.” “You must really like cigar smoke.” “Not especially, but I think two cigars going at the same time would look awfully amusing.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“The apartment was on the sixteenth floor. It was old-fashioned, which meant that the rooms were large and light-filled, the ceilings high enough to permit a constant circulation of air, and the walls thick enough for a man and his loving wife to have a stimulating argument at the top of their lungs without invading the nervous systems of surrounding neighbors. Raymond had rented the apartment furnished and nothing in the place beyond the books, the records, and the phonograph was his.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“The first thing a human being is loyal to, Yen Lo observed, is his own conditioned nervous system.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“Who killed Jocie, Ben?”—and Marco could not answer him. “Ben, did I—did I kill Jocie? That could be, couldn’t it? Maybe it was an accident, but they wanted me to kill Senator Jordan and—did I kill my Jocie?”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“Of these, 79 had actually been removed from the service.” Raymond’s mother’s subtraction of 79 cases from 286 cases left 207 cases, the number with which she had had Johnny kick off. She had made one other small change. The Secretary’s actual language had been “recommendation against permanent employment,” which she had changed to read: “members of the Communist party,” which Johnny had adjusted to read: “card-carrying Communists.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“How can I continue to live, he shouted at high scream under the nave of his encompassing skull, if people are going to continue to carry bundles of pain on top of their heads like Haitian laundresses, then fling the bundles at random into the face of any bright stroller who happened to be passing by?”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate