The Manchurian Candidate Quotes

“Raymond stood as though someone might have just opened a beach umbrella in his bowels.”
― 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

“Amateur psychiatric prognosis can be fascinating when there is absolutely nothing else to do.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Poor Raymond. I’m the only one he has. Not that he needs anybody. Old Raymond has only enough soul to be able to tolerate two or three people in his life. I’m one of them. There’s a girl I think he weeps over after he locks the doors. There’s room for just about one more and he’ll be full up. I hope it’s you because having Raymond on your side is not unlike being backed up by the First Army.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“Raymond may have believed that his eyes did light up, but unfortunately they could shine only within the extent of his art as a counterfeiter of emotions.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“Broadway was patrolled by strange-looking pedestrians, people who had grabbed the wrong face in the dark when someone had shouted “Fire!” and were now out roaming the streets, desperate to find their own.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“It was a strip of city too dishonest to admit it was a slum, or rather, in all of the vastness of the five boroughs of metropolis there was a strip of city, very tiny, which was not a slum, and this was the thin strip that was photographed and its pictures sent out across the world until all the world and the minuscule few who lived in that sliver of city thought that was New York, and neither knew or cared about the remainder of the six hundred square miles of flesh and brick.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“Nonetheless, her Johnny had become the only American in the country’s history of political villains, studding folk song and story, to inspire concomitant fear and hatred in foreigners, resident in their native countries. He blew his nose in the Constitution, he thumbed his nose at the party system or any other version of governmental chain of command. He personally charted the zigs and zags of American foreign policy at a time when the American policy was a monstrously heavy weight upon world history. To the people of Iceland, Peru, France, and Pitcairn Island the label of Iselinism stood for anything and everything that was dirty, backward, ignorant, repressive, offensive, antiprogressive, or rotten, and all of those adjectives must ultimately be seen as sincere tributes to any demagogue of any country on any planet.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“The American Association of Scientists asked that this statement be published: 'Senator Iselin puts the finishing touches on his sabotage of the morale of American scientists to the enormous net gain of those who work against the interests of the United States.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“About what?' She leaned forward slightly because information is the prime increment of power.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“Only twice was there a time when he did not maintain the full and automatic three-hundred-and-sixty-degree horizon of raw sensibilities over which swept the three searing beams of suspicion, fear, and resentment flashing from the loneliness of the tall lighthouse of his soul.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“A man has few enough opportunities like that when he assists in the raising of children, who must be hoisted on the pulley of one’s experience every morning to the top of the pole for a view of life as extensive as that day’s emotional climate would bear, then lowered again at sundown to be folded up and made to rest, and carried into their dreams with reverence.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“What is the consciousness of guilt but the arena floor rushing up to meet the falling trapeze artist? Without it, a bullet becomes a tourist flying without responsibility through the air. The consciousness of guilt gives a scent to humanity, a threat of putrefaction, the ultimate cosmetic. 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

“Of course, he explained, the psychotic group known as paranoiacs had always provided us with the great leaders of the world and always would. That was a clinical, historical fact. With their dedicated sense of personal mission (a condition that has been allowed to become tainted semantically, he pointed out, with the psychiatric label of megalomania), with their innate ability to falsify hampering conditions of the past to prevent unwanted distortion of the future, with that relentless, protective cunning that places the whole world, in revolving turn, into position as their enemies, paranoiacs simply had to be placed in the elite stock of any leader pool.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“Although the paranoiacs make the great leaders, it is the resenters who make their best instruments because the resenters, those men with cancer of the psyche, make the great assassins.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“Through arrangements beyond his control, Raymond had developed into a man who sagged fearfully within a suit of stifling armor, imprisoned for the length of his life from casque to solleret. It was heavy, immovable armor, this thick defense, which had been constructed mainly at his mother’s forge, hammered under his stepfather’s noise, tempered by the bitter tears of his father’s betrayal.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“An infinite anguish must mark his life. He flees the world to find himself in solitude and solitude terrifies him because it is too close to his despair.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

“Like an angry man with a cane who pokes a hole through the floor of heaven and is scalded by the joy that pours down upon him, Raymond had a capacity for using satisfactions against himself.”
― 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