Arthur Jensen [Ned Beatty]: You have meddled with the primal forces of
nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it! Is that clear? You think
you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case! The Arabs
have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must
put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological
balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and
peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no
Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no
West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and
immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion
of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks,
rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of
currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is
the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic
and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the
primal forces of nature, and YOU... WILL... ATONE! Am I getting
through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch
screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America.
There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and
DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the
world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their
councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming
charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute
the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments,
just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and
ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations,
inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world
is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the
slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect
world... in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality.
One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to
serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock.
All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom
amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.
-- Paddy Chayefsky, "Network" (movie, 1976)
Howard Beale [Peter Finch]: What is finished... is the idea that this
great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every
individual in it. It's the individual that's finished. It's the
single, solitary human being that's finished. It's every single one of
you out there that's finished, because this is no longer a nation of
independent individuals. It's a nation of some 200-odd million
transistorized, deodorized, whiter-that-white, steel-belted bodies,
totally unnecessary as human beings, and as replaceable as piston
rods... Well, the time has come to say, is dehumanization such a bad
word. Because good or bad, that's what is so. The whole world is
becoming humanoid - creatures that look human but aren't. The whole
world not just us. We're just the most advanced country, so we're
getting there first. The whole world's people are becoming
mass-produced, programmed, numbered, insensate things...
-- Paddy Chayefsky, "Network" (movie, 1976)