Richard Condon > Quotes

“Mason took in enough cannabis smoke to allow a Lipan Apache manipulating a blanket over it to transmit the complete works of Tennyson.”
― Richard Condon, Money Is Love

“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

“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

“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

“He felt the sadness of Lucifer.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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 sergeant’s account of his past was ancient in its form and confusingly dramatic, as perhaps would have been a game of three-level chess between Richard Burbage and Sacha Guitry.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate / Winter Kills / Prizzi's Honor

“Then he had beaten her with a hockey stick because he had objected to her nailing the paw of a beige cocker spaniel to the floor because the dog was stubborn and refused to understand the most elemental instructions to remain still when she had called out the command to do so.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate / Winter Kills / Prizzi's Honor

“She would lie in the darkness and hear the rain, then hear her father’s soft, soft step rising on the stairs after he had slipped the bolt into the lock of the attic door, and she would slip out of her long woolen night dress and wait for the warmth of him and the wonder of him.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate / Winter Kills / Prizzi's Honor

“How can I continue to live, he shouted at high scream under the nave of his encompassing skull,”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate / Winter Kills / Prizzi's Honor

“Raymond also distrusted all other living people because they had not warned his father of his mother.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate / Winter Kills / Prizzi's Honor

“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

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

“Michelangelo had said that the successful completion of a great mosaic must rest upon the infinite design in the placement of a single tile.”
― Richard Condon, The Oldest Confession

“Marco was an intelligent intelligence officer.”
― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate / Winter Kills / Prizzi's Honor

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Nothing frightened Raymond. A man needs to have something to lose to become frightened. Even only one thing that is his and that he values will make it possible for threat to scare a man, but Raymond had nothing.”
― 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

“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

“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