A guitar beats a woman every time.
Lonesome Rhodes
I'm not just an entertainer. I'm an influence, a wielder of opinion, a force... a force!
Lonesome Rhodes
Not always. Back in Riddle they was pretty strict. Didn't allow us to touch hard liquor till we was 10 or 11.
Lonesome Rhodes
Well, tell you the flat truth, it's just a sort of a whatchacallit, a...
Lonesome Rhodes
Compost heap's more like it.
Lonesome Rhodes
This whole country's just like my flock of sheep!
Lonesome Rhodes
Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers - everybody that's got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle. They don't know it yet, but they're all gonna be 'Fighters for Fuller'. They're mine! I own 'em! They think like I do. Only they're even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for 'em. Marcia, you just wait and see. I'm gonna be the power behind the president - and you'll be the power behind me!
Lonesome Rhodes
Those morons out there? Shucks, I could take chicken fertilizer and sell it to them as caviar. I could make them eat dog food and think it was steak. Sure, I got 'em like this... You know what the public's like? A cage of Guinea Pigs. Good Night you stupid idiots. Good Night, you miserable slobs. They're a lot of trained seals. I toss them a dead fish and they'll flap their flippers.
Lonesome Rhodes
Listen, I'm not through yet. You know what's gonna to happen to me?
Lonesome Rhodes
Betty Lou is your public, all wrapped up with yellow ribbons into one cute little package. She's the logical culmination of the great 20th-centure love affair between Lonesome Rhodes and his mass audience.
Marcia Jeffries
They love his voice, they love his guitar, they love his ideas... they should know some of his ideas.
Marcia Jeffries
You put your whole self into that laugh, don't you?
Marcia Jeffries
You always drink like that?
Marcia Jeffries
Now is there really a town called Riddle?
Marcia Jeffries
Here you see the lepers of the great television industry. Men without faces. Why, they even slide our paychecks under the door so they can pretend we're not here.
Mel Miller