Quotes / Do Not Do This Cool Thing

Anime and Manga

We are legally required to tell you that stealing is wrong, and you shouldn't do it.

— Ōkami-san (while Ryoshi is rifling through a boy's bag)

“To tell you the truth, I feel that the fundamental messages I put into Gundam, such as theories about society and war, are hindered by the design of the giant robot called Gundam and aren’t being conveyed as well as I would like. Children like dinosaurs and giant robots, and Gundam’s popularity is an extension of that.”

— Yoshiyuki Tomino

Literature

Be a man, and do not follow me!

— Epigram added to later editions of The Sorrows of Young Werther after it was blamed for causing copycat suicides.

If I have painted vice in all its gayest colours, if I have deck'd it with flowers, it has been solely to make the worthier, the solemner sacrifice of it, to virtue.

— Fanny Hill

Weaver: It’s the same, being a villain. I went there, I did that for a few months. Risked my life, hurt people, made an incredible amount of money, but I look back, and it wasn’t worth it. I value the people I got to know and love far more than I do the money, the power, the fame. They’re the only thing I regret leaving behind.
Maggie: How much money?

— Worm, Drone 23.4

"There is talk that many Vietnam films are antiwar, that the message is war is inhumane and look what happens when you train young American men to fight and kill, they turn their fighting and killing everywhere, they ignore their targets and desecrate the entire country, shooting fully automatic, forgetting they were trained to aim. But actually, Vietnam war films are all pro-war, no matter what the supposed message, what Kubrick or Coppola or Stone intended. Mr. and Mrs. Johnson in Omaha or San Francisco or Manhattan will watch the films and weep and decide once and for all that war is inhumane and terrible, and they will tell their friends at church and their family this, but Corporal Johnson at Camp Pendleton and Sergeant Johnson at Travis Air Force Base and Seaman Johnson at Coronado Naval Station and Spec 4 Johnson at Fort Bragg and Lance Corporal Swofford at Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base watch the same films and are excited by them, because the magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills."

— Anthony Swofford, Jarhead

Live-Action TV

James May: Don't do this, children, 10-year-olds, and 52-year-olds, if you're watching.
Richard Hammond: Or 52-year-old children...
James May: We're not condoning locking other people's bicycles up, or, indeed, unplugging people's electric car, because when they come back and the range just says "2," it's not funny! [starts laughing, followed by the other two]
Jeremy Clarkson: We're not saying you should do that.
James May: No, you shouldn't.
Jeremy Clarkson: We're just saying you can do that. [James cracks up again]

— Top Gear (UK)

Newspapers

Al Pacino does not make Montana into a sympathetic character, but he does make him into somebody we can identify with, in a horrified way, if only because of his perfectly understandable motivations. Wouldn't we all like to be rich and powerful, have desirable sex partners, live in a mansion, be catered to by faithful servants — and hardly have to work? Well, yeah, now that you mention it. Dealing drugs offers the possibility of such a lifestyle, but it also involves selling your soul.

—Roger Ebert on Scarface (1983)

Newspaper Comics

Huey: Tell 'em that marijuana isn't nearly as dangerous as tobacco or alcohol, but it will make you say stupid things and laugh at stuff that ain't funny. That's a very good reason not to use it!
Caesar: Huey, you forget that most people don't find smiling and joviality as offensive as you do.

— The Boondocks

Podcasts

"So the message here is, doing drugs gets you chicks!"

— Rifftrax Live, Reefer Madness

Stand-Up Comedy

"It doesn't matter how big the warnings on the cigarettes are; you could have a black pack, with a skull and crossbones on the front, called TUMORS, and smokers would be around the block going, 'I can't wait to get my hands on these fucking things! I bet ya get a tumor as soon as you light up!'"

— Denis Leary, No Cure for Cancer

"Marion Barry? Come on, how are you gonna tell little kids to not get high... when their mayor is on crack? 'Don’t get high. You won’t be nothing.' 'I could be Mayor!'"

— Chris Rock, Bring The Pain

Theater

"I do solemnly swear I will not go home and try any of the stupid crap I saw those guys do, even though it would make me super cool."

— The oath that The Danger Committee makes the audience swear before every performance

Web Animation

"Can a video game use shooty gameplay to induce emotions other than visceral joy, or will the intended message inevitably be overlooked by an audience who are probably trying to have fun shooting things?"

— Yahtzee on Spec Ops: The Line

Webcomics

"I hope that by reading this manual, you will be thoroughly encouraged to become a farmer."

— Meti's Sword Manual, Kill Six Billion Demons

Web Original

"Stein goes down with a snarky one-liner about the Daleks being just in time for the fun before he suicides to destroy them all. [Lawrence] Miles and [Tat] Wood describe it as 'adolescent,' but that’s not the real problem. The problem is that it’s macho action movie posturing of the most stereotypical kind. In other words, it’s exactly the sort of thing the story is supposedly critiquing. And yet in this scene it’s played as a big, cathartic moment."

— El Sandifer on Doctor Who, "Resurrection of the Daleks"

"But, the moralists will howl, this makes crime look glamorous and rewarding! Well guess what? Crime is rewarding, and if you can do it on a big enough scale, you can even buy some glamour. So why are you shooting the messenger?"

— Yves Smith, "The Misdirected Outrage Over The Wolf of Wall Street"

"I'm pretty sure it was also meant to be Smallville's entry into the entertainment cycle surrounding Alcohol Awareness Week. If so, I'm going to suggest that the point was not so much missed as completely misunderstood and trampled upon."

— Julian Finn on Smallville, "Fortune"

"Wey-hey! An honest to God great Chakotay moment when he punches Dalby in the face! Unfortunately he was using this as an example of how the Marquis way is not the way to go, whereas I was thinking it would make a far more interesting show!"

— Joe Ford on Star Trek: Voyager, "Learning Curves"

"For a drama (or book, or whatever) to invite an audience to feel superior to a less enlightened era even as it teases the regressive urges behind the behaviors associated with that era strikes me as the worst possible offense that can be committed in a creative work set in the past: it's simultaneously contemptuous and pandering."

— Daniel Mendelsohn, "The Mad Men Account"

My grandpa used to tell me all the time that if I kept sucking my thumb, I would grow a monkey's [tail]!! It just made me suck it more.

— "Monkey Child", I Used to Believe

"Yeah, the problem with Warhammer 40,000 as a "satire" is that it presents the Imperium as completely right. The Emperor MUST subsist on a diet of countless lives or else everyone will die via demons. Dissidence MUST be purged because the risk of Chaos would overpower anything else. Xenophobia IS justified because yes, all the outsiders DO want to kill you. The universe is written in a way that fascism's hatred of outsiders is completely justified.
Its like reading Animal Farm, except the book tells you that Snowball DID destroy the windmill, Napoleon IS making the farm a better place, and Boxer DID go to a hospital."

"When your "blinkered view of purity" can banish demons and create miracles yeah you are the good guys… in the setting.
Honestly it feels like GW is trying to clean up for their failure to actually show the grim dark in the writing. The majority of the writing, fluff and lore definitely don’t illustrate the Imperium as evil or grimdark or whatever. At worst it illustrates a humanity desperately trying to hold on in an eternal heroic last stand. At best it illustrates self sacrifice and nobility against cosmic evil.
If they really wanna show the imperium as a bad guy among bad guys they are going to have to step up their writing and improve the way they illustrate their fluff."

— Anonymous comments, on a Reddit thread about an official article clarifying the Imperium as the bad guys

Web Video

"And yet, at every turn, the comic keeps trying to make HYDRA look like some unstoppable juggernaut: utilizing seemingly cool iconography; improvements on the world like advancing science, and better test scores, and more jobs; and sure, the concentration camps and restrictions on free speech and stuff are mentioned, but more like glanced over and ignored, especially since we got our 'benevolent leader' Steve Rogers who 'just wants to help.'"

— Linkara in his review of Secret Empire, Atop the Fourth Wall

"It wants to convey a message about how high-tech surveillance is creepy and evil, even though you end up using high-tech surveillance to fight crimes way better than the cops can fight crimes."

— George Weidman on Watch_Dogs

Western Animation

"You're watching Futurama, the show that does not advocate the cool crime of robbery."

— Bender, Futurama, "Bender Should Not Be Allowed On Television"

Stan: That's not true. You can't get high off of cat urine, can you?

Mr. Mackey: Well, it's a it's not actually cat urine, but male cats, when they're marking their territory, uh spread concentrated urine to fend off other male cats and... a-and that could get you really high. M'kay? Re-really reeeally high. Okay? (Beat) Probably shou-shouldn't have told you that just now. Hm'kay? Tha, that was probably bad.

— South Park, "Major Boobage"

"You. Friends. Fun. Drink. Hot girls. You're hot. Drink more. Expensive cars. Ass, drink, ass, money, you in a tuxedo, threesomes, vodka, pussy, drink, drink, drink, you, drink, Vegas, fun, pussy, you, in a tuxedo, fucking this girl, vodka, drink drink drink drink it all you fucking pussy! MORE TUXEDOS, MORE CARS, MORE PUSSY, MORE VODKA, DRINK DRINK DRINK!"

"Please drink responsibly."

— South Park, "Freemium Isn't Free"

Real Life

"I find that violence is very ambiguous in movies. For example, some films claim to be antiwar, but I don't think I've really seen an antiwar film. Every film about war ends up being pro-war."

— François Truffaut in an interview by Gene Siskel

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus

— Alex Blechman, on Twitter

"I didn’t want to be riding in my car and hear some right-wing shock jock playing my music and hearing my voice."

— Tim Robbins, on why he never released a soundtrack album for Bob Roberts

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