A Clockwork Orange quotes

View Quote Alex: [narrating while being forced to watch a World War II movie with Nazis.] It was the next day, brothers. And I had truly done my best, morning and afternoon, to play it their way and sit like a horrorshow cooperative malchik in the chair of torture, while they flashed nasty bits of ultraviolence on the screen. Though not on the soundtrack, my brothers -- the only sound being music. Then I noticed, in all my pain and sickness, what music it was that, like, cracked and boomed. It was Ludwig Van -- 9th symphony, 4th movement.
Alex: [screaming] STOP IT! STOP IT, PLEASE! I BEG YOU! IT'S A SIN! IT'S A SIN! IT'S A SIN! IT'S A SIN! IT'S A SIN! IT'S A SIN!
Dr. Brodsky: Sin? What's all this about sin?
Alex: THAT! Using Ludwig van like that! He did no harm to anyone! Beethoven just wrote music!
Dr. Branom: Are you referring to the background score?
Alex: YES!
Dr. Branom: You've heard Beethoven before?
Alex: YES!
Dr. Brodsky: So you're keen on music?
Alex: [Emphatically] YES!
Dr. Brodsky: Can't be helped. Here's the punishment element perhaps. The Governor ought to be pleased...I'm sorry, Alex, this is for your own good. You'll have to bear with us for a while.

View Quote Alex: [narrating] There were some sophistos from the TV studios around the corner, laughing and gavreeting. The devotchka was smecking away, not caring about the wicked world one bit. Then the disc on the stereo twanged off and out. And in the short silence before the next one came on, she suddenly came with a burst of singing. [the woman starts singing. Alex watches, with a smile creeping across his face] And it was like, for a moment, O my brothers, some great bird had flown into the milkbar. And I felt all the malenky little hairs on my plott standing endwise, and the shivers crawling up like slow, malenky lizards, and then down again. Because I knew what she sang. It was a bit from the Glorious Ninth by Ludwig Van.
[Dim derisively rasps at the woman, but Alex angrily smashes him across the legs with his cane]
Dim: What did you do that for?
Alex: For being a bastard with no manners, you haven't a dook of an idea how to comport yourself public-wise, O my brother! [smiles at the woman and raises his glass to her]
Dim: I don't like you should do what you've done and I'm not your brother no more and wouldn't want to be.
Alex: Watch that, do watch that O Dim, if to continue to be on live thou, dost wist?
[The sophistos, and a couple of bouncers, watch the exchange nervously from their tables, while Pete and Georgie stare at their boots]
Dim: Yarbles! Great bolshy yarblockos to you! I'll meet you with chain or nozh or britva anytime. I'm not having you aiming tolchocks at me reasonless. It stands to reason, I won't have it.
Alex: A nozh scrap anytime you say.
['uncomfortable pause]
Dim: Doobiedoob, a bit tired maybe, best not to say more. Bedways is rightways now, so best we go homeways and get a bit of spatchka. Right-right?
Pete and Georgie: Right-right.
Alex: Right-right.

View Quote Alex: [voiceover] One thing I could never stand was to see a filthy, dirty old drunkie, howling away at the filthy songs of his fathers and going blerp, blerp in between, as it might be a filthy old orchestra in his stinking rotten guts. I could never stand to see anyone like that, whatever his age might be, but more especially when he was real old like this one was.
[The boys stop and applaud the Tramp's singing]
Tramp: Can you spare some cutter, me brothers?
[Alex rams his club into the tramp's stomach]
Tramp: Go on, do me in, you bastard cowards. I don't want to live anyway...not in a stinking world like this.
Alex: Oh...and what's so stinking about it?
Tramp: It's a stinking world because there's no law and order any more. It's a stinking world because it lets the young get onto the old, like you done. Oh...it's no world for an old man any longer. What sort of a world is it at all? Men on the moon, and men spinning around the earth, and there's not no attention paid to earthly law and order no more.

View Quote Alex: It's no good sitting there in hope, my little brothers... I won't say a single solitary slovo unless I have my lawyer here! I know the law, you bas****.
Inspector: Righty-right, Tom. We'll have to show our little friend Alex, here, that we know the law, too. But that knowing the law isn't everything.

View Quote Alex: Let's get things nice and sparkling clear. This sarcasm, if I may call it such, does not become you, O my little brothers. As I am your droog and leader, I am entitled to know what goes on, eh? Now then, Dim, what does that great big horsy gape of a grin portend?
Georgie: All right, no more picking on Dim, brother. That's part of the new way.
Alex: New way? What's this about a new way? There's been some very large talk behind my sleeping back, and no error.
Georgie: Well, if you must have it, have it then. We go around, shop crasting and the like, coming out with a pitiful rookerful of money each.
Dim: Pitiful rookerful.
Georgie: And there's Will the English, in the Muscleman coffee mesto, saying he can fence anything that any malchick tries to crast. The shiny stuff, the ice, the big, big, big money is available, is what Will the English says.
Dim: Big, big money.
Alex: And what will you do with the big, big, big money? Have you not everything you need? If you need a motor car, you pluck it from the trees. If you need pretty polly, you take it.
Georgie: Brother, you think and talk sometimes like a little child.

View Quote Alex: The old days are dead and gone. For what I did in the past, I've been punished. I've been cured.
Dim: Cured, yeah! That was read out to us. The Inspector read it all out to us. He said it was a very good way.
Alex: But what is all this? was them that went for me, brothers. You're not on their side, and can't be. Well, you can't be, Dim. It was someone we fillied with back in the old days, trying to get his own little bit of revenge after all this time. Remember, Dim?
Dim: Long time is right. I don't remember them days, too horrorshow. And don't call me Dim no more either! Officer, call me!
Georgie: Enough is remembered, though, Little Alex.
Dim: This is to make sure you stay cured!
[he and Georgie beat Alex bloody and half-drown him]

View Quote Alex: Your wife, sir, is she away?
Mr. Alexander: NO, SHE'S DEAD!
Alex: I'm sorry to hear about that, sir.
Mr. Alexander: [raving] She was very badly raped, you see. We were assaulted by a gang of vicious young hoodlums in this house, in this very room you are sitting in now. I was left a helpless cripple, but for her, the agony was too great. The doctors said it was pneumonia because it happened some months later during a flu epidemic. The doctors told me it was pneumonia but I knew what it was. A victim of the modern age - poor, poor girl. [calmer] And now, you, another victim of the modern age, but you can be helped.

View Quote Cat Lady: Oh shit. Who's there?
Alex: Excuse me, missus, can you please help? There's been a terrible accident. Can I please use your telephone for an ambulance?
Cat Lady: I'm frightfully sorry. There is a telephone in the Public House about a mile down the road. I suggest you use that.
Alex: But, missus, this is an emergency. It's a matter of life and death. Me friend's lying in the middle of the road bleeding to death.
Cat Lady: I'm very sorry but I never open the door to strangers after dark.
Alex: Very well, madam. I suppose you can't be blamed for being suspicious with so many scoundrels and rouges of the night about. Dim, bend down. I'm gonna get in that window and open the front door.
Cat Lady: Hello, Radlett Police Station. Good evening. It's Miss Weathers at Woodmere Health Farm. hello Look, I'm frightfully sorry to bother you but something rather odd has just happened... Well, it's probably nothing at all, but you never know... Well, a young man ring the bell asking to use the telephone... He said there had been some kind of accident. The thing that caught my attention was what he said ó the words he used, sounded exactly like what was quoted in the papers this morning in connection with the writer and his wife who were assaulted last night... Well, just a few minutes ago... Well, if you think that's necessary, but, well, I'm quite sure he's gone away now. Oh... alright. Fine. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Alex: Hi, hi, hi there! At last we meet. Our brief govoreet through the letter-hole was not, shall we say, satisfactory, yes?
Cat Lady: Who are you? How the hell did you get in here? What the bloody hell d'you think you're doing?
Alex: Naughty, naughty, naughty, you filthy old soomaka.
Cat Lady: Now listen here, you little bastard, just you turn around and walk out of here the same way as you came in. leave it alone Don't touch it. That's a very important work of art. What the bloody hell do you want?
Alex: Will to be perfectly honest, madam, I taking part of an international student's contest to see who can get the most points for selling magazines.
Cat Lady: Cut the shit, sonny, and get out of here before you get yourself in some very serious trouble. I told you to leave it alone. Now get out of here before I throw you out, wretched slummy bedbug. I'll teach you breaking into real people's houses. ****ing little bastard! Get out!

View Quote Chaplain: Choice! The boy has no real choice, has he?! Self-interest, the fear of physical pain drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrong-doer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.
Minister: Padre, these are subtleties! We are not concerned with motives, with the higher ethics. We are concerned only with cutting down crime! And with relieving the ghastly congestion in our prisons. He will be your true Christian, ready to turn the other cheek, ready to be crucified rather than crucify. Sick to the very heart at the thought even of killing a fly. Reclamation, joy before the angels of God. The point is that it works!
Alex: [voice-over] And the very next day, your Friend and Humble Narrator was a free man.

View Quote Chaplain: The Governor has grave doubts about it [aversion therapy] and I have heard that there are very serious dangers involved.
Alex: I don't care about the dangers, Father. I just want to be good. I want for the rest of my life to be one act of goodness.
Chaplain: The question is whether or not this technique really makes a man good. Goodness comes from within. Goodness is chosen. When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.
Alex: I don't understand about the whys and wherefores, Father. I only know I want to be good.
Chaplain: Be patient, my son. Put your trust in the Lord.

View Quote Conspirator: Do you still feel suicidal?
Alex: Well, put it this way, I feel very low in myself. I can't see much in the future, and I feel that any second something terrible is going to happen to me. [slumps into spaghetti]

View Quote Dad: I wonder, where exactly is it he goes to work of evenings?
Mum: Well, like he says, it's mostly odd things he does, helping like, here and there as it might be.

View Quote Deltoid: Dear, dear, this boy does look a mess, doesn't he? Just look at the state of him.
Policeman: Love's young nightmare, like.
Inspector: Violence makes violence. He resisted his lawful arrestors.
Deltoid: Well, this is the end of the line for me, eh? The end of the line, yes!

View Quote Deltoid: There was a bit of a nastiness last night, yes? Some very extreme nastiness, yes? A few of a certain Billyboy's friends were ambulanced off late, yes? Your name was mentioned, the word has got thru to me by the usual channels. Certain friends of yours were named also. Oh, nobody can prove anything about anybody as usual, but I'm warning you, little Alex, being a good friend to you as always, the one man in this sore and sick community who wants to save you from yourself!
[he strikes Alex sharply in the groin]
[Alex gets up and adjusts his underwear]
[Deltoid blindly drinks water from a glass with dentures soaking inside.]
Deltoid: What gets into you all? We study the problem. We've been studying it for damn well near a century, yes, but we get no further with our studies. You've got a good home here, good loving parents, you've got not too bad of a brain. Is it some devil that crawls inside of you?
Alex: Nobody's got anything on me, brother, sir. I've been out of the rookers of the millicents for a long time now.
Deltoid: That's just what worries me. A bit too long to be safe. You're about due now by my reckoning. That's why I'm warning you, little Alex, to keep your handsome young proboscis out of the dirt. Do I make myself clear?
Alex: As an unmuddied lake, sir. As clear as an azure sky of deepest summer. You can rely on me, sir.
[Deltoid drinks from the glass again, and sees the dentures inside. He gags.]

View Quote Minister: Cram criminals together and what do you get - concentrated criminality, crime in the midst of punishment.
Governor: I agree, sir, what we need are larger prisons - more money.
Minister: Not a chance, my dear fellow. The Government can't be concerned any longer with outmoded penological theories. Soon we may be needing all our prison space for political offenders. Common criminals like these are best dealt with on a purely curative basis. Kill the criminal reflex, that's all. Full implementation in a year's time. Punishment means nothing to them, you can see that. They enjoy their so-called punishment.
Alex: You're absolutely right, sir.
Chief Guard: Shut your bleedin' hole!
Minister: Who said that?
Alex: I did, sir.
Minister: What is your crime?
Alex: The accidental killing of a person, sir.
Chief Guard: He brutally murdered a woman, in furtherance of theft! Fourteen years, sir!