Mendelsohn Quotes & Sayings

The results of recent research on the impacts of climate change dramatically weaken the case for expensive, near-term abatement programs. — Robert O. Mendelsohn

One of the things that I found very confronting in my early working life was that people thought I was some sensitive doe-eyed lovelorn boy, because they'd seen me do that a couple of times. What tends to happen is you get a run of similar roles. — Ben Mendelsohn

I've spent various periods of my career being thought of as various things, various degrees of substance and ideas. — Ben Mendelsohn

There's very little different between the way the government operates in America and the way criminals do. — Ben Mendelsohn

I did and do believe, after all that I've seen and done, that if you project yourself into the mass of things, if you look for things, if you search, you will, by the very act of searching, make something that would not otherwise have happened, you will find something, even something small, something that will certainly be more than if you hadn't gone looking in the first place, if you hadn't asked our grandfather anything at all...There are no miracles, no magical coincidences. There is only looking and finally seeing, what was always there. — Daniel Mendelsohn

In Australia, even the darkest subject matter has a little pinch of humor. A little sweet to make the sour go down. — Ben Mendelsohn

You think of 'Outlaw Josey Wales,' you immediately think of the old Indian guy, Sondra Locke, the old lady with the glasses, beautiful old actress. — Ben Mendelsohn

Although it is important to examine the consequences of today's actions far into the future, it is important not to confuse far future actions with what is done today. The impact of emissions that are made after 2100 has no bearing on what the world should do for the next 30 or even 100 years. — Robert O. Mendelsohn

My favorite-ever version of 'King Lear' is the 1971 film by Peter Brooks. He has this enormous fur thing, and it adds enormous gravitas. — Ben Mendelsohn

I did 'Quigley Down Under,' which is quite deliberately placed in Australia, which is a Tom Selleck, Alan Rickman, Laura San Giacomo film from '88, I want to say. — Ben Mendelsohn

There are always dimensions, and the way they get expressed is through the writing and the actors and the director you get to work with on that day. But there are always dimensions, outside of really basic stuff for very young people where it needs to be very clear. — Ben Mendelsohn

I'm very cagey by nature. — Ben Mendelsohn

Mothers, Grandmothers, and Mother Nature are the best doctors around. — Robert S. Mendelsohn

I have an intensive relationship with the thing that I'm working on, and I hope that comes through. It's better for me to not worry about the things I can't fix once they're done. — Ben Mendelsohn

Homeopathy for me are effective natural remedies that have no side effects. — Robert S. Mendelsohn

I generally feel like people that are doing the wardrobe know more about wardrobe than I do, and they have an overview. — Ben Mendelsohn

People don't know who I am, and that's not a bad thing at all from my end. — Ben Mendelsohn

Here again, it occurred to me, was the unique problem that faces my generation, the generation of those who had been, say, seven or eight years old during the mid-1960s, the generation of the grandchildren of those who'd been adults when it all happened; a problem that will face no other generation in history. We are just close enough to those who were there that we feel an obligation to the facts as we know them; but we are also just far enough away, at this point, to worry about our own role in the transmission of those facts, now that the people to whom those facts happened have mostly slipped away. — Daniel Mendelsohn

I wanted to keep working because work was essentially fantastic - you got to be around people, you got to be in a family, and that family changed from job to job. It was like being in the circus. — Ben Mendelsohn

'Animal Kingdom' was an amalgam of two people that I had met-slash-known, not particularly well. They were both very, very scary people for very different reasons. — Ben Mendelsohn

The spring came suddenly; the rains stopped, the days grew noticeably longer, and the afternoon light felt powdery, as if it might blow away. — Jane Mendelsohn

Life is a lot sweeter, I think, than you can be aware of it at times. — Ben Mendelsohn

My general feeling about approach to work is that anyone that's there, they're all there to do the best job they can. — Ben Mendelsohn

Acting is a bit of a heart and soul exercise with me. It's kind of all I've got. — Ben Mendelsohn

The very rough story is this: Melbourne boy, out of both my parents' houses at a young age, lived with my grandmother, drama teacher twisted me into doing this TV thing that I thought my mates were doing, too. — Ben Mendelsohn

It's got a lot more room for nuance and an assumption that people have started from the beginning. 'Bloodline' ends up being like a really good novel. — Ben Mendelsohn

When you're a young boy, you're looking at older men for role modelling. Before I loved De Niro, I loved Clint Eastwood; I loved John Wayne. And James Bond. — Ben Mendelsohn

If you've been working since you were a teenager and working at a reasonably decent level, then you don't expect that you're going to be firmly in your 40s and start moving up in the world, if you like. — Ben Mendelsohn

Be yourself, because you are the perfect YOU! — Jacci Mendelsohn

One of my earlier films is 'Quigley Down Under.' That was early on in my career, and that was horsey. — Ben Mendelsohn

I'm very well known in the industry and relatively well known by people who are aficionados and what not, but outside of that - no. — Ben Mendelsohn

I don't know if tennis players feel like that but when you have a great opponent - although I didn't feel like he [ Ben Mendelsohn ] was an opponent - you just know your game is going to jack up and it's just going to raise the bar. I couldn't wait for that elevation. — John Leguizamo

At any period of an actor's life, it's fairly likely that they'll be cast in ways that are reminiscent. That's the way it goes. — Ben Mendelsohn

Most young actors, that's all they're trying to do: Get better at acting and be able to keep doing it. And that doesn't work out for most people. — Ben Mendelsohn

Crewing and being on film sets is kind of like being in the carnival, with carnie folks. — Ben Mendelsohn

I think I've benefited from not being hugely known. It means I have to do something really effective to be noticed. — Ben Mendelsohn

For a pediatrician to attack what has become the "bread and butter" of pediatric practice is equivalent to a priest denying the infallibility of the pope. — Robert S. Mendelsohn

$3,000 from a residual cheque was all I made one year. — Ben Mendelsohn

Accents are always difficult in their way, but as long as you're not throwing an audience off with it, then that's all it should be. — Ben Mendelsohn

I don't know; I haven't heard from Uncle Stuart since the day we drove out to Brooklyn together to talk to Mirav Mendelsohn. I miss him, in a way. He meant so much more to me than I could ever mean to him. You don't get too many people like that. Roy Belisle and Bob Santacroce and Stuart Plotz- any one of them could have been something that was almost everything, if things had worked out just a little differently. — Joshua Ferris

I've been a Ryan Reynolds fan since the first time I saw him. — Ben Mendelsohn

As an outsider in America, you do see the kind of hypocrisy that's rampant there. — Ben Mendelsohn

Fifteen years old, out in the world, acting was all I had. — Ben Mendelsohn

I think that story wins out over acting and that the thing as a whole is more important than the performances therein. — Ben Mendelsohn

You feel an affinity with younger actors, because, you know, it's a very insecure job. And it can be a long time before you feel like, you know, things might be all right. — Ben Mendelsohn

'Slow West' is a western, and it's sort of a twist on the genre stylistically, I think, from what I understand going in. — Ben Mendelsohn

'The Outlaw Josey Wales' is one I watched again and again and again in the early days of VHS. — Ben Mendelsohn

The way that actors talk about acting is generally quite punishing, and I think actors want to put forward the idea that they do all of this work because, you know, it's a post-De Niro world, when, largely, in fact, it's almost never true. — Ben Mendelsohn

'Animal Kingdom' is a lot of things, but it's not heartwarming. — Ben Mendelsohn

The people that impress me are Bob Dylan. The ones who keep working, year in and year out, and keep coming up with stuff. — Ben Mendelsohn

I got the first job and kept going. Once I got a job, I very much wanted to keep getting jobs, basically. I did try to learn what I could in those first couple of decades. — Ben Mendelsohn

'Star Wars' is populated by so many great types; who wouldn't want to be a Han Solo kind of dude? — Ben Mendelsohn

It's a tougher gig than what people think it is. The proper, real, genuine, worldwide movie stars don't get a lot of downtime from the world outside. That's a tougher price, I think, than what people's fantasy of fame account for. — Ben Mendelsohn

There were the usual types of things that happen, in a production, like logistical bullshit, and this and that and the other. That's the sort of stuff that happened. But I never felt, in a creative sense, that we were ever veering into a place that I hadn't signed on for. — Ben Mendelsohn

You can certainly extend your adolescence. There's people that are very good at extending it indefinitely. — Ben Mendelsohn

The three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War, and the Titanic. — Daniel Mendelsohn

sunt lacrimae rerum, "There are tears in things. — Daniel Mendelsohn

Authority could derive from passion, not pieces of paper. — Daniel Mendelsohn

I suspect, for a lot of people who become actors, there's a feeling of wanting to be someone other than who they actually are. — Ben Mendelsohn

Typically, I'll wake up at 4:30 in the morning. It's just the continual jet lag residue, just weird sleeping hours. — Ben Mendelsohn

I had traveled far, had circled the planet and studied my Torah, and at the very end of my search I was standing, finally, in the place where everything begins: the tree in the garden, the tree of knowledge that, as I learned long ago, is something divided, something that because growth occurs only through the medium of time, brings both pleasure and, finally, sorrow. — Daniel Mendelsohn

If you rush to take a drug, do so with the full knowledge that you are being a Guinea Pig. The longer a drug is on the market, the more will be known about the side effects. — Robert S. Mendelsohn

Mother's milk, time-tested for millions of years, is the best nutrient for babies because it is nature's perfect food. — Robert S. Mendelsohn

I was with my grandmother, while one of my brothers lived with my dad, and one lived with my mom. It wasn't a great situation. Acting was the one good thing I was involved in. — Ben Mendelsohn

For (strange as it may sound to many people, who tend to think of critics as being motivated by the lower emotions: envy, disdain, contempt even) critics are, above all, people who are in love with beautiful things, and who worry that those things will get broken. What motivates so many of us to write in the first place is, to begin with, a great passion for a subject (Tennessee Williams, Balanchine, jazz, the twentieth-century novel, whatever) that we find beautiful; and, then, a kind of corresponding anxiety about the fragility of that beauty. — Daniel Mendelsohn

The world community simply should not support such extreme measures when there are so many other pressing issues at hand. The optimal response to greenhouse gases is to start modestly. — Robert O. Mendelsohn

In a very real sense, all you do when you're shooting film or television is you shoot a scene, and then you shoot another scene, and then you shoot another scene. — Ben Mendelsohn

...I like to see things through the lens of Greek tragedy, which teaches us, among other things, that real tragedy is never a straightforward confrontation between Good and Evil, but is rather much more exquisitely and much more agonizingly, a conflict between two irreconcilable views of the world. — Daniel Mendelsohn

As soon as you start acting in an accent, you're sort of out of your comfort zone. Maybe people start getting used to accents after a long period of time. But as soon as you do that, it's not so much as capturing the sound of the way other people speak, it's being able to actually be and move around in the sound. — Ben Mendelsohn

I got a good-enough adolescence. I mean, there's a sense wherein you skip a part of childhood, too, when you start working at that age I did; I was out working and out of home at 15, paying my own way in the world. — Ben Mendelsohn

...that the holocaust is so big, the scale of it is so gigantic, so enormous that it becomes easy to think of it as something mechanical. Anonymous. But everything that happened, happened because someone made a decision to pull a trigger, to flip a switch, to close a cattle door, to hide, to betray. — Daniel Mendelsohn

I think difficult characters are very rewarding to do. They often have facets to them and this and that. — Ben Mendelsohn

Before 'Animal Kingdom,' I wasn't particularly thought of in villainous roles. — Ben Mendelsohn

The reason doctors are so dangerous is that they believe in what they are doing. — Robert S. Mendelsohn

the Holocaust wasn't something that simply happened, but is an event that's still happening.) — Daniel Mendelsohn

It would be excellent to do a 'Star Wars.' — Ben Mendelsohn

Fassbender is fearless; he's a fearless actor. — Ben Mendelsohn

The people I've encountered who are really dangerous in my life don't go around with their fangs drawn - they are dangerous because of the way they interpret what's going on. — Ben Mendelsohn

For mine, the villains of the piece were always important. In a traditional sense, that's always an important role. — Ben Mendelsohn

For me it's a compliment, playing baddie characters. I take it as a compliment. — Ben Mendelsohn

I grew up loving the John Wayne and Clint Eastwood westerns. — Ben Mendelsohn

An epic without a focus - without a single action, a coherent plot, a single terrible point to make - was just a very long poem. — Daniel Mendelsohn

The greatest threat of childhood diseases lies in the dangerous and ineffectual efforts made to prevent them through mass immunisation ... There is no convincing scientific evidence that mass inoculations can be credited with eliminating any childhood disease. — Robert S. Mendelsohn

I had to work with Ben Mendelsohn who's one of the great actors of our time. I had a lot of scenes with him and I was thrilled to be on the set with him; I just wanted to see how we were going to play it. — John Leguizamo

At 15 I had moved out of my parents' place, and my options were looking pretty narrow. But I had this acting thing and I just wanted to be able to keep going because it was really good. That was all I wanted. — Ben Mendelsohn

I believe in the bible. I believe in the one true God. I believe he is the one true God because he's the only one that loved me enough to actually take action in my life. — Jacci Mendelsohn

Let me give you a little Mendelsohn 101: I came up in television in the early- to mid- 1980s in Australia. — Ben Mendelsohn

I think now there's much more of a confessional culture. That's not my bag. I come from a slightly older school of thought: 'give 'em nothin.' You don't plead guilty. — Ben Mendelsohn

I never felt like someone who was boyish and coming to terms with asking girls out or anything like that, which was what 'The Big Steal' and 'Spotswood' were about. But I guess that's the impression I left on people. — Ben Mendelsohn

Closeness can lead to emotions other than love. It's the ones who have been too intimate with you, lived in too close quarters, seen too much of your pain or envy or, perhaps more than anything, your shame, who, at the crucial moment, can be too easy to cut out, to exile, to expel, to kill off. — Daniel Mendelsohn

Acting is broad enough a church that you can pick your races, decide which way you want to go at different times.I think that the story and circumstance tends to dictate the most and then what you do with your own approach after that. — Ben Mendelsohn

To be alive is to have a story to tell. — Daniel Mendelsohn

I had a pretty good career at home. What keeps you going is not having a plan B. It's a very good thing. I think if I had a viable plan B, I might not have kept going. — Ben Mendelsohn

To be alive today is to have a story to tell. To be alive is precisely to be the hero, the center of a life story. When you can be nothing more than a minor character in somebody else's tale, it means that you are truly dead. — Daniel Mendelsohn

If you're going to be a father and whatnot, yeah, you better be responsible about it as best you can. — Ben Mendelsohn

I remember 'The Yearling' was the first film I ever saw, and my mom told me I cried for about four or five days afterwards. I'd be going along during the day and suddenly start crying over what had happened to the little deer. — Ben Mendelsohn

And so the picture that I showed her that Sunday, a picture I'd seen countless times since I was a boy, brought home to me for the first time the strangeness of my relationship to the people I was interviewing, people who were rich in memories but poor in keepsakes, whereas I was so rich in the keepsakes but had no memories to go with them. — Daniel Mendelsohn

The difference between that man and me," Alan Mendelsohn said, "is that I am a connoisseur, and he is a fanatic. — Daniel Pinkwater

I think it's that thing of growing up all the time watching American movies and listening to American music. It hits you in a way that's a lot purer because you are not in that culture that you're watching. — Ben Mendelsohn

If you ride like lightning, you're gonna crash like thunder. — Ben Mendelsohn