"[while in a standoff with an enraged Messner.] I didnt kill your man downstairs I found him like that. Whether you believe or not, man that shit aint even important. We can either work this out and live or we can keep doin the same shit we been doin. Now I dont have any problem with you or your bureau so I think you should just roll off and just let us move on."
Smokin' Aces is a 2006 crime action thriller film written and directed by Joe Carnahan. The film centers on the chase for a Las Vegas magician turned mafia informant after a one-million-dollar bounty is placed on him. It stars Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Common, Andy García, Alicia Keys, Ray Liotta, Jeremy Piven, and Ryan Reynolds. Smokin' Aces was the official acting debut of Keys and Common.
"What do you see right now? You see exactly and only what I choose to show you. That is illusion, Ivy. That is the lie that I tell your eyes. Makin the magic happen in the moment, in that split second you can see past this motherfucker and find thats all bullshit. I can shape it, I can shift it, I can make it as real as this room. That is why I am valuable here Ivy, and that is why you are not. I am sorry. I love you. I never wanted it to be like this, you know that."
Smokin' Aces"Are you a colossal fucking idiot?"
Smokin' Aces"Hugo, youre looking at me like I just asked you the fucking square root of something. What did you say to Mecklen on the little motherfucking machine?!"
Smokin' Aces"These flowers have wilted. Call the florist."
Smokin' Aces"And I say this from the bottom of my heart: retire."
Smokin' Aces"We just gotta keep ourselves together. Stay with me. Stay with me man. Hugo, you with me? You with me baby?"
Smokin' Aces"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."
"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."
"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"
"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"