You should be merciful, when there is time to be merciful. But you must maintain your own standard. You owe them that. You owe them that. The penalty you deserve for your transgressions, they deserve for their transgressions.
The Big Man
Dogville quotes
Page 5 of 16God only knows what that woman's capable of.
Chuck
You think they're fine? I don't think so, I think there is a lot this country has forgotten. I just try and refresh folks memory by way of illustration.
Tom
Tom's father had been a doctor and now received a modest pension so it was no great disaster for Tom to drift about not doing anything in particular. Tom was a writer... at any rate by his own lights. Oh, his output as committed to paper was so far limited to the words "great" and "small", followed by a question mark, but nevertheless meticulously archived in one of his many bureau drawers... In order to postpone the time at which he would have to put pen to paper in earnest, Tom had now come up with a series of meetings on moral rearmament with which he felt obliged to benefit the town.
Grace paused. And while she did, the clouds scattered and let the moonlight through and Dogville underwent another of those little changes of light. It was if the light, previously so merciful and faint, finally refused to cover up for the town any longer. Suddenly you could no longer imagine a berry that would appear one day on a gooseberry bush, but only see the thorn that was there right now. The light now penetrated every unevenness and flaw in the buildings... and in... the people! And all of a sudden she knew the answer to her question all to well: If she had acted like them, she could not have defended a single one of her actions and could not have condemned them harshly enough.
Is there another way?
Grace
Grace was standing beside Tom, watching them convene, and knew inside herself that this might well be the last time she would see these now so familiar faces. She had at least two of them against her, and even one would have been too many.
For passion, originality, and sustained chutzpah, this austere allegory of failed Christian charity and Old Testament payback is von Trier's strongest movie — a masterpiece, in fact.
J. Hoberman in The Village Voice
A simple tale, told so well while being so revealing. There are many reasons why it shouldn't work, but because it does, it feels magical.
Jeffrey Chen in Window to the Movies
It would take a true knucklehead not to understand that Dogville isn't so much Anywhere, U.S.A., as anywhere. It really is a masterpiece — von Trier's first, as it happens.
Glenn Kenny at Premeire magazine
I'll happily mind Achilles if Vera will let me. But if he doesn't like me he doesn't like me.
Grace
Something...something that you would like done, but that you don't think is necessary.
Grace
Happy times in Dogville
And now, since the town had agreed that everyone was to give according to his abilities she received wages, not much, but enough to save up for the first of the tiny china figurines from the row of seven that had stood for so long gathering dust in the window of the store. And she dreamed that in time she would be able to acquire them all. Slowly those alabaster hands turned into a pair of hands that could have belonged to anyone in any little rural community.
I hate it, yet I'm fascinated by the magnitude of the ambition and the failure to realize it.
Bruce Kirkland in Jam! Movies
She could have kept her vulnerability to herself, but she had elected to give herself up to him at random. As... Yes... a gift. "Generous, very generous", thought Tom.