Citizen Kane 1941 quotes, page 2

Charles Foster Kane

Six years ago, I looked at a picture of the world's greatest newspaper men. I felt like a kid in front of a candy store. Well, tonight, six years later, I got my candy-all of it. Welcome, gentlemen, to the Inquirer! Make up an extra copy of that picture and send it to the Chronicle, will you please? It'll make you all happy to learn that our circulation this morning was the greatest in New York, 684,000.

Mr. Bernstein

Six hundred and eighty-four thousand one hundred and thirty-two!

Charles

Right! Having thus welcomed you, I hope you'll forgive my rudeness in taking leave of you. I'm going abroad next week for a vacation. I've promised my doctor for some time now that I'd leave when I could, and I now realize that I can't.

Bernstein

Say, Mr. Kane, as long as you're promising, there's a lot of pictures and statues in Europe you haven't bought yet.

Charles

You can't blame me, Mr. Bernstein. They've been making statues for two thousand years, and I've only been buying for five.

Bernstein

Promise me, Mr. Kane.

Charles

I promise you, Mr. Bernstein.

Bernstein

Thank you.

Charles

Mr. Bernstein? You don't expect me to keep any of those promises, do you?

Charles

...Whatever I do, I do because I love you.

Susan

You don't love me. You want me to love you. [She mimicks him] 'Sure, I'm Charles Foster Kane. Whatever you want, just name it and it's yours. But you've gotta love me!'

Susan

Don't tell me you're sorry.

Charles

I'm not sorry.

Charles

I'm staying here. I can fight this all alone.

Emily

Charles, if you don't listen to reason, it may be too late.

Charles

Too late. For what? For you and this public thief to take the love of the people of this state away from me?

Susan

Charlie, you got other things to think about. Your little boy, you don't want him to read about you in the papers.

Charles

There's only one person in the world who decides what I'm going to do, and that's me.

Emily

You decided what you were going to do, Charles, some time ago.

Charles

Are we going to declare war on Spain, or are we not?

Leland

The Inquirer already has.

Charles

You long-faced, overdressed anarchist.

Leland

I am not overdressed.

Charles

You are too. Mr. Bernstein, look at his necktie.

Charles

Hello, Jedediah.

Leland

Hello, Charlie. I didn't know we were speaking...

Charles

Sure, we're speaking, Jedediah: you're fired.

Charles

I set back the sacred cause of reform, is that it? All right, that's the way they want it, the people have made their choice. It's obvious the people prefer Jim Gettys to me.

Leland

You talk about the people as though you owned them, as though they belong to you. Goodness. As long as I can remember, you've talked about giving the people their rights, as if you can make them a present of Liberty, as a reward for services rendered...Remember the working man?

Charles

I'll get drunk too, Jedediah, if it'll do any good.

Leland

Aw, it won't do any good. Besides, you never get drunk. You used to write an awful lot about the workingman...He's turning into something called organized labor. You're not going to like that one little bit when you find out it means that your workingman expects something is his right, not as your gift! Charlie, when your precious underprivileged really get together, oh boy! That's going to add up to something bigger than your privileges! Then I don't know what you'll do! Sail away to a desert island probably and lord it over the monkeys!

Charles

I wouldn't worry about it too much, Jed. There'll probably be a few of them there to let me know when I do something wrong.

Leland

Mmm, you may not always be so lucky...You don't care about anything except you. You just want to persuade people that you love 'em so much that they ought to love you back. Only you want love on your own terms. Something to be played your way, according to your rules.

Charles

Now look, Mr. Carter, here's a front-page story in the Chronicle about a Mrs. Harry Silverstone in Brooklyn who's missing. Now, she's probably murdered. Here's a picture of her in the Chronicle. Why isn't there something about it in the Inquirer?

Carter

'Cause we're running a newspaper...
...

Carter

There's no proof that that woman is murdered, or even that she's dead...It's not our function to report the gossip of housewives. If we were interested in that kind of thing, Mr. Kane, we could fill the paper twice over daily.

Charles

Mr. Carter, that's the kind of thing we are going to be interested in, from now on.

Charles

Read the cable.

Bernstein

"Girls delightful in Cuba. Stop. Could send you prose poems about scenery, but don't feel right spending your money. Stop. There is no war in Cuba, signed Wheeler." Any answer?

Charles

Yes. "Dear Wheeler: you provide the prose poems. I'll provide the war."

Charles

This gentleman was saying...

I'm not a gentleman. [To Emil] Your husband's only trying to be funny calling me one. I don't even know what a gentleman is. You see, my idea of a gentleman...Well, Mrs. Kane, if I owned a newspaper and I didn't like the way somebody was doing things, some politician say, I'd fight him with everything I had. Only I wouldn't show him in a convict's suit with stripes so his children could see the picture in the paper, or his mother.

Charles

You know, Mr. Bernstein, if I hadn't been very rich, I might have been a really great man.

Walter Parks Thatcher

Don't you think you are?

Charles

I think I did pretty well under the circumstances.

Walter Parks Thatcher

What would you like to have been?

Charles

Everything you hate.

Emily

He happens to be the president, Charles, not you.

Charles

That's a mistake that will be corrected one of these days.

Emily

Really Charles, people will think-...

Charles

- -what I tell them to think.

Emily

Sometimes, I think I'd prefer a rival of flesh-and-blood.

Charles

Oh Emily, I don't spend that much time on the newspaper.

Emily

It isn't just the time. It's what you print - attacking the President.

Charles

You mean Uncle John.

Emily

I mean the President of the United States.

Charles

He's still Uncle John, and he's still a well-meaning fathead who's letting a pack of high-pressure crooks run his administration. This whole oil scandal...

Emily

He happens to be the President, Charles, not you.

Charles

That's a mistake that will be corrected one of these days.

If you could've found out what Rosebud meant, I bet that would've explained everything.

Thompson

No, I don't think so; no. Mr. Kane was a man who got everything he wanted and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn't get, or something he lost. Anyway, it wouldn't have explained anything... I don't think any word can explain a man's life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a... piece in a jigsaw puzzle... a missing piece.

Leland

Bernstein, am I a stuffed shirt? Am I a horse-faced hypocrite? Am I a New England school marm?

Bernstein

Yes. If you thought I'd answer you any differently than what Mr. Kane tells you...