Quiz Show Quotes - Kelly Inglis's Weblog



Quiz Show Quotes

Radio: All is not well with America

Herb Stempel: They love me for the same reason they used to hate me, because I’m the guy that knows everything.

Herb: [referring to television] That box is the biggest thing since Gutenberg invented the printing press

Dan Enright: How much do they pay instructors up at Columbia?

Charles Van Doren: Eighty-six dollars a week.

Dan Enright: Do you have any idea how much Bozo the Clown makes?

Charles Van Doren: Well... we, we can't all be Bozo the Clown.

Charles Van Doren: But I think I’d really rather try to beat him honestly

Charles Van Doren: I'm just trying to imagine what Kant would make of this.

Charles Van Doren: It just doesn’t seem right. I have to say no… Was that part of the test?

TV producer: Why would a guy like that want to be on a quiz show?

Herb: Don't do this to me, it's humiliating.

Enright: For seventy grand, Herb, you can afford to be humiliated.

TV producer: How did you know he’d go for it?

Enright: What would you do?

Goodwin’s collegue about Goodwin: He wants to be mistaken for someone important.

Charles Van Doren’s student (quoting Keats): “Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty/That is all you need to know on earth and all you need to know.”

Enright: You’re doing the right thing. Really. Everybody’s making money.

Charles Van Doren: It’s not as if the money fell into my lap. I worked for it.

Mark Van Doren (quoting Shakespeare): “Some rise by sin and some by virtue, fall” (Measure For Measure)

Charles Van Doren: (quoting Shakespeare): “To do a great right, to do a little wrong” (Merchant Of Venice)

Charles Van Doren (quoting Shakespeare): “Things without [all]remedy should be without regard, what's done is done” (Macbeth )

Herb: My father told me, work hard and you’ll get ahead. Was that honest?

Charles Van Doren (at poker game): The truth has its price.

TV producer: This is the largest classroom in the world professor, television.

Herb: They asked, how would you like to make $25,000? I said, who wouldn’t.

Congressman to Herb: You prostituted your intellectual abilities for money.

Herb: That’s the difference. I admitted it. I have my morality.

TV producer: Television is a public trust.

TV producer to Charles Van Doren: Haven’t we been good to you? Haven’t we treated you like one of the family? … I know you’re going to do the right thing?

Goodwin (defending his attempt to protect Charles Van Doren): The purpose is not to reform the contestants but to reform television.

Mark Van Doren: Sixty-four thousand dollars for a question, I hope they are asking you the meaning of life.

Goodwin: I want to think the best of you Charlie. Everyone does. That's your curse.

Goodwin: I remember five-six years ago my uncle Harold told my aunt about this affair he had.... The affair was over, something like eight years. So I remember asking him, "Why did you tell her? You got away with it." And I'll never forget what he said. It was the getting away with it part that he couldn't live with.

Mark Van Doren (about Don Quixote): If you want to be a knight, act like a knight.

Mark Van Doren: Cheating on a quiz show! That’s sort of like plagiarizing a comic book.

Mark Van Doren: It’s just a bunch of frauds showing off an erudition they didn’t really have.

Charles Van Doren: What was I supposed to do? Disillusion the whole goddamn country?

Mark Van Doren: Your name is mine!

Charles Van Doren: I would give almost anything I have to reverse the course of my life in the last year. The past doesn't change for anyone, but at least I can learn from the past. I've learned a lot about life. I've learned a lot about myself, and about the responsibilties any man has to his fellow man. I’ve learned a lot about good and evil. They are not always whay they appear to be. I was involved, deeply involved in a deception. I have deceived my friends, and I have millions of them. I lied to the American people. I lied about what I knew, then I lied about what I did not know. In a sense I was like a child who refuses to admit a fact in the hope that it would go away. Of course it did NOT go away. I was scared... scared to death. I had no solid position, no basis to stand on for myself. There was one way out and that was simply to tell the truth. It may sound trite to you but I've found myself again after a number of years. I've been acting a role of thinking that I have done more, accomplished more. produced more than I actually have. I've had all the breaks. I've stood on the shoulders of life and I have never gotten down into the dirt to build a foundation of my own. I've flown too high on borrowed wings. Everything came too easy. That is why I am here today.

Congressman: I'm happy that you've made the statement. But I cannot agree with most of my colleagues. See, I don't think an adult of your intellegence should be commended for simply, at long last, telling the truth.

Congressman (to Enright): And you, obviously, don’t think you did anything wrong.

Enright: Yes, we did one thing. We were too successful.

…

Congressman: Mr. Enright, you make it sound like you were the victim here.

Enright: The sponsor makes out, the network makes out, the contestants see money they would never see in a lifetime and the public is entertained. So who gets hurt?

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