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Robert De Niro

American actor, director and producer (born 1943)

Robert De Niro, Jr. (born August 17, 1943) is an American film actor, director, producer, and founder of the Tribeca Film Festival. He has won an Academy Award twice.

There’s something more powerful than bombs, and that’s your vote. People must vote!

Quotes

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  • These movies are like my children, except you can't remake my children in 3D to push up the grosses.
  • I don’t know, it’s crazy that people like Donald Trump ... he shouldn’t even be where he is, so God help us. What he’s been saying is really totally crazy, ridiculous ... he is totally nuts. But I think now they are really starting to push back, the media ... finally they are starting to say, ‘come on Donald, this is ridiculous, this is nuts, this is insane.
  • The administration’s mean-spiritedness towards our art and entertainment is an expression of their mean-spirited attitude about people who want that art and entertainment, people who also want and deserve decent wages, a fair tax system, a safe environment, education for their children and healthcare for all.
  • When you started school, the country was an inspiring, uplifting drama. You are graduating into a tragic, dumbass comedy. My advice is to lock the [university’s] Van Wickle gates and stay here.
  • I’m gonna say one thing. Fuck Trump. It’s no longer down with Trump. It’s fuck Trump.
  • We are in a moment in our lives, in this country, where this guy is like a gangster. We say over and over again: ‘This is terrible, we’re in a terrible situation, we’re in a terrible situation,’ and this guy just keeps going on and on and on without being stopped.
    • Reliable Sources, CNN, (September 29, 2019)
  • Give him a chance. That’s what I said right after he was elected. Give him a chance. I give everybody the benefit of the doubt. This guy has proven himself to be a total loser.
    • The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, CBS, (November 26, 2019)
  • Even gangsters have morals, and they have ethics. They have a code, and you know when you give somebody your word, it’s your word, because it’s all you have is your word. This guy, he doesn’t even know what that means.
    • The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, CBS, (November 26, 2019)
  • It’s Shakespearean, the whole thing. You’ve got a lunatic saying things that people are trying to dance around.
    It’s appalling. He wants to be reelected. He doesn’t even care how many people die.
    • Newsnight, BBC, (May 12, 2020)
  • He doesn’t care for those people, and the people who he pretends to care about are the people he has the most disdain for. They might like to tell themselves or to delude themselves, but he doesn’t care about them.
    • Newsnight, BBC, (May 12, 2020)

What I've Learned

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Esquire, January 2003.
  • I like it when interviews are brief. Are we done yet?
  • Some people say, "New York's a great place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there." I say that about other places.
  • There's no such thing as not being afraid.
  • I didn't have a problem with rejection, because when you go into an audition, you're rejected already. There are hundreds of other actors. You're behind the eight ball when you go in there.
  • The hardest thing about being famous is that people are always nice to you. You're in a conversation and everybody's agreeing with what you're saying—even if you say something totally crazy. You need people who can tell you what you don't want to hear.
  • When I'm directing a great dramatic scene, part of me is saying, "Thank God I don't have to do that." Because I know how fucking hard it is to act. It's the middle of the night. It's freezing. You gotta do this scene. You gotta get it up to get to that point. And yet, as a director, you've got to get the actors to that point. It's hard either way.
  • As you get older, the more complicated things get. It's almost therapeutic to be doing simple things with the kids.
  • If you don't go, you'll never know.

Robert De Niro: ‘Trump is a real racist, a white supremacist’

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David Smith, "Robert De Niro: ‘Trump is a real racist, a white supremacist’", The Guardian, (January 6, 2019)
 
I’m older now and I’m just upset about what’s going on. When you see someone like [Trump] becoming president, I thought, well, OK, let’s see what he does – maybe he’ll change. But he just got worse. It showed me that he is a real racist. I thought maybe as a New Yorker he understands the diversity in the city but he’s as bad as I thought he was before – and much worse. It’s a shame. It’s a bad thing in this country.
  • I’m older now and I’m just upset about what’s going on. When you see someone like [Trump] becoming president, I thought, well, OK, let’s see what he does – maybe he’ll change. But he just got worse. It showed me that he is a real racist. I thought maybe as a New Yorker he understands the diversity in the city but he’s as bad as I thought he was before – and much worse. It’s a shame. It’s a bad thing in this country.
  • If he had his way, we’d wind up in a very bad state in this country. I mean, the way I understand it, they laughed at Hitler. They all look funny. Hitler looked funny, Mussolini looked funny and other dictators and despots look funny.
  • What bothers me is that there will be people in the future who see him as an example and they’ll be affected in some way, but they’ll be a lot smarter and have many more colours to their personality and be more mercurial and become someone with the same values as he has but able to get much further and do more damage as a despot. That’s my worry. There are people who look up to him: ‘I want to be like him.’ But they’ll do it much better and they’ll be more smart about it.
  • I mean, a mob boss calls people ‘a rat’. That means you lied and somebody snitched on you, so you did commit the crime. So that’s interesting, and he makes mobsters look bad because there are mobsters who will shake your hand and keep their word. He can’t even do that.
  • Trump is basic. He’s just a guy who just thinks he can rattle off his mouth and say anything. Well, I want to say the same thing to him: there are people who are going to say the same thing back to you, no matter who you are.
  • Rupert Murdoch became a citizen of this country; look what he’s contributed by this. This is what he’s going to leave. This is his legacy. It’s disgraceful. He’s cynical, amoral, but he has a responsibility. He came here as an immigrant, technically, and look what he did. You cannot justify having Fox News as a mouthpiece for the government. It’s wrong. It’s beyond disgusting.
  • You need somebody who’s strong enough to outmouth him – because that’s all he is, mouth – and smart enough and well-informed enough in a debate, say, to override all that nonsense that he does, be-cause basically it’s just name-calling. He has no substance. I don’t know how people fall for it. He’s just a big blowhard. But it ain’t over till it’s over as far as I’m concerned with a guy like him because he’s a dirty player.

Robert De Niro on Donald Trump: 'I can't wait to see him in jail'

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Andrew Pulver, “Robert De Niro on Donald Trump: 'I can't wait to see him in jail'”, The Guardian, (October 11, 2019)
  • We have a real, immediate problem in that we have a gangster president who thinks he can do any-thing he wants … the problem is, if he actually gets away with it, then we all have a problem.
    The gall of the people around him who actually defend him, these Republicans, is appalling, and we must do something about it.
  • It’s a resentment of people [who are] writing about what we see is obvious gangsterism. They don’t like that, so they say: ‘Fuck you, we’re going to teach you people.’ And they have to know they’re going to be taught … they can’t get away with bullying us – people who have common sense and see what is happening in this world, and in this country. They cannot do it. It’s a shame, it’s a shame that [the Republicans] behave so badly.”
  • Oh, I can’t wait to see him in jail. I don’t want him to die, I want him to go to jail.

Robert De Niro Believes Trump Will Start a War So He Can Serve Three Terms as President

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Marlow Stern, “Robert De Niro Believes Trump Will Start a War So He Can Serve Three Terms as President”, The Daily Beast, (Nov. 20, 2019)
  • I’m worried because if he gets re-elected, it’s gonna be very, very bad—very bad on a lot of levels. We already have a lot of reparations, if you will—repairs—to do to the damage that he’s already done, and he has to be gotten out. He’s going to be history at one point, though he’d love to be president for life. He jokes about it. I think that if he became president for a second term he’d try to have a third term, and let smarter people manipulate it into getting us into some kind of altercation: a war.
  • The only other president who served a third term was Roosevelt because he was in a war, and this fool would go and start something. This was what Marty Scorsese was saying, and I said, ‘Marty, I never thought of that. I never thought he’d go for a third term if there was a war or something. Trump joked about being ‘president for life’ with [Chinese president Xi Jinping] and so-on, he’ll pardon anybody, he’ll do anything. The day after he was elected, I went on a TV show and said I’d give him the benefit of the doubt and say that I hope he won’t be as bad as I think he will be, but he’s turned out to be a lot worse.
  • I’m not really political but I saw when [Trump] would go to those rallies and he’d say, ‘I want to get this person and punch him in the face,’ and I’d think, how dare this person have this kind of a rally? How dare you do that! And I think about [Rupert] Murdoch, and what he did to this country. He’s an immigrant who became a citizen, and look what he contributed? Look what this guy did? It’s disgraceful—beyond disgraceful, beyond cynical. Fox News, it’s all about money and power. At what cost? And you’re not even an American. You’re someone who wanted to be an American, and this is what you gave us?
  • I’m just so incensed by this guy. He’s conning people every day. It’s a blight on our country. We have a lot of making-up to do to earn back people’s trust, and to get back on track where certain allies will trust us enough to know that we won’t allow an idiot to get in office again.
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