“But what I hope most of all is that you understand what I mean when I tell you that even though I do not know you, and even though I may never meet you, laugh with you, cry with you, or kiss you. I love you. With all my heart, I love you.”

“There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.”

“It is the oldest ironies that are still the most satisfying: man, when preparing for bloody war, will orate loudly and most eloquently in the name of peace.”

“Sexually progressive cultures gave us literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust.”

“Your pretty empire took so long to build, now, with a snap of history's fingers, down it goes.”

“There's no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill. There's only an idea. Ideas are bulletproof.”

“The ending is nearer than you think, and it is already written. All that we have left to choose is the correct moment to begin.”

“In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagined past.”

“Equality and freedom are not luxuries to lightly cast aside. Without them, order cannot long endure before approaching depths beyond imagining.”

“Authority, when first detecting chaos at its heels, will entertain the vilest schemes to save its orderly facade.”

“Real life is messy, inconsistent, and it's seldom when anything ever really gets resolved. It's taken me a long time to realize that.”

“You know what I wish? I wish all the scum of the Earth had one throat and I had my hands about it.”

“We have laboured long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors.”

“I didn't put you in a prison, Evey. I just showed you the bars.”

“Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.”

“Authority allows two roles: the torturer and the tortured. Twists people into joyless mannequins that fear and hate, while culture plunges into the abyss.”

“As I see it, part of the art of being a hero is knowing when you don't need to be one anymore.”

“Everybody has their story to tell.”

“A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there's no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?”

“In order to be able to make it, you have to put aside the fear of failing and the desire of succeeding. You have to do these things completely and purely without fear, without desire. Because things that we do without lust of result are the purest actions we shall ever take.”

“Look at him now, poor fellow. That's what a dose of reality does for you...Never touch the stuff myself, you understand. Find it gets in the way of the hallucinations.”

“I live my life free of compromise, and step into the shadows without complaint or regret.”

“With so much chaos, someone will do something stupid. And when they do, things will turn nasty”

“How can two people hate so much without knowing each other?”

“To me, all creativity is magic. Ideas start out in the empty void of your head - and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It's an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that's not the most important thing. It's the work itself.”

“Who makes the world? Perhaps the world is not made. Perhaps nothing is made. Perhaps it simply is, has been, will always be there…a clock without a craftsman.”

“It's all a joke! Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for... it's all a monstrous, demented gag! So why can't you see the funny side? Why aren't you laughing?”

“There, did you think to kill me? There's no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill. There's only an idea.

“Who imprisoned me here? Who keeps me here? Who can release me? Who's controlling and constraining my life except...me?”

“I think that storytelling and creation are very close to what the center of what magic is about. I think not just for me, but for most of the cultures that have had a concept of magic, then the manipulation of language, and words, and thus of stories and fictions, has been very close to the center of it all.”

“Never despair. Never surrender.”

“Dan, I'm not a Republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago.”

“The world's a stage, & everything else is Vaudeville.”

“American love — like coke in green glass bottles...they don't make it anymore.”

“The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout 'SAVE US!'...and I'll look down and whisper 'No.”

“Who? Who is but the form following the function of what, and what I am is a man in a mask.”

“I'm the king of the 20th century. I'm the boogeyman, the villian, the black sheep of the family.”

“Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious.”

“I'm 65 years old. Everyday the future looks a little bit darker. But the past, even the grimy parts of it, well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time.”

“Don't leave home without your sword - your intellect.”

“There is no coincidence. Only the illusion of coincidence.”

“While a truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power.”

“I love you, but why must you love the law? 'Tis plain for all to see that she's a whore...that virtuous persons have no need to woo; that villains screw, then studiously ignore.”

“Nothing is insoluble. Nothing is hopeless. Not while there's life.”

“Happiness is a prison, Evey. Happiness is the most insidious prison of all.”

“Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.”

“Nothing's that simple, not even things that are simply awful.”

“The one place Gods inarguably exist is in our minds where they are real beyond refute, in all their grandeur and monstrosity.”

“We are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later.”

“To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate — unlike most films.”