- Eugene O'Neill: If you were mine, I wouldn't share you with anybody or anything. It'd be just you and me. We'd be the center of it all. I know it would feel a lot more like love than being left alone with your work.
- Eugene O'Neill: You and Jack have a lot of middle-class dreams for two radicals. Jack dreams that he can hustle the American working man, whose one dream is to be rich enough not to have to work, into a revolution led by his party. And you dream that if you discuss the revolution with a man before you go to bed with him, it'll be missionary work rather than sex. I'm sorry to see you and Jack so serious about your sports. It's particularly disappointing in you, Louise. You had a lighter touch when you were touting free love.
- Eugene O'Neill: Jack dreams that he can hustle the American working man, whose one dream is that he could be rich enough not to work, into a revolution led by *his* party.
- Emma Goldman: I think voting is the opium of the masses in this country. Every four years you deaden the pain.
- John Reed: All right, Miss Bryant, do you want an interview? Write this down. Are you naïve enough to think containing German militarism has anything to do with this war? Don't you understand that England and France own the world economy and Germany just wants a piece of it? Keep writing, Miss Bryant. Miss Bryant, can't you grasp that J. P. Morgan has loaned England and France a billion dollars? And if Germany wins, he won't get it back! More coffee? America'd be entering the war to protect J. P. Morgan's money. If he loses, we'll have a depression. So the real question is, why do we have an economy where the poor have to pay so the rich won't lose money?
- Louise Bryant: Would you rather I not smoke during rehearsal?
- Eugene O'Neill: I'd rather you went up in flames than crush out your cigarette during a monologue about birth.
- [first lines]
- Witness 1: [voiceover] Was that in 1913 or 17? I can't remember now. Uh, I'm, uh, beginning to forget all the people that I used to know, see?
- Witness 2: [voiceover] Do I remember Louise Bryant? Why, of course, I couldn't forget her if I tried.
- John Reed: Look, what does a capitalist do? Let me ask you that, Mike. Huh? Tell me. I mean, what does he make, besides money? I don't know what he makes. The workers do all the work, don't they? Well, what if they got organized?
- John Reed: What did you think this thing was gonna be? A revolution by consensus where we all sat down and agreed over a cup of coffee?
- Emma Goldman: Nothing works. Four million people died last year. Not from fighting a war, they died from starvation and typhus in a militaristic police state that suppresses freedom and human rights where nothing works.
- [last lines]
- Witness: [voiceover] Of course, nobody goes with the idea of dying, everybody wants to live. I don't remember his exact words, but the meaning was that grand things are ahead, worth living and worth dying for. He himself said that.
- Eugene O'Neill: I'd like to kill you, but I can't. So you can do whatever you want to. Except not see me.
- John Reed: Zinoviev, you don't think a man can be an individual and be true to the collective, or speak for his own country and speak for the International at the same time, or love his wife and still be faithful to the revolution. You don't have a "self" to give.
- Grigory Zinoviev: Would you be willing to give yourself to this revolution?
- John Reed: You separate a man from what he loves most, what you do is purge what's unique in him. And when you purge what's unique in him, you purge dissent. And when you purge dissent, you kill the revolution! Dissent IS revolution!
- Louise Bryant: All right, wait a minute. Let me get this straight. You want me to come with you to New York?
- John Reed: Yes.
- Louise Bryant: What as? What as?
- John Reed: What do you mean, what as?
- Louise Bryant: What as? Your girlfriend?
- John Reed: What does that mean?
- Louise Bryant: What as? Your girlfriend, your mistress, your paramour, your concubine?
- John Reed: Why does it have to be as anything?
- Louise Bryant: Because I don't wanna get into some kind of emotional possessive involvement where I'm not able to... I want to know what as.
- John Reed: Well, it's nearly Thanksgiving. Why don't you come as a Turkey?
- Self - Witness: You know something that I think that there was just as much fucking going on *then* as now. Only now, it has a more perverted quality to it. Now, there's no love whatever included, you know. Then, there was your heart, a bit of heart in it.
- Speaker - Liberal Club: What is this war about? Each man will have his own answer. I have mine. I'm ready to be called! Now, tonight we have with us the son of Margaret and the late C.J. Reed of Portland, who has witnessed this war first-hand. And I, for one, see no reason why we here at the Liberal Club shouldn't listen to what Jack Reed has to say. What would you say this war is about, Jack Reed?
- John Reed: [stands up] Profits.
- [sits down]
- John Reed: Freedom, Mrs. Trullinger? I'd like to know what your idea of freedom is. Having your own studio? Walk..
- Louise Bryant: I'd like to see you with your pants off, Mr. Reed.
- John Reed: You don't get to rewrite what I write! You don't get to rewrite what I write!
- Pete Van Wherry: Stubborn son-of-a-bitch. How are you gonna pay your rent?
- Louise Bryant: I bet your mother's glad to see you back in Portland.
- John Reed: My mother's glad when I'm not in jail.
- Self - Witness: I think that a guy who's always interested in the condition of the world and changing it, either has no problems of his own or refuses to face them.
- Louise Bryant: [singing] I don't want to play in your yard, I don't like you anymore, You'll be sorry when you see me, Sliding down our cellar door, You can't holler down our rain barrel, You can't climb our apple tree, I don't want to play in your yard, If you won't be good to me
- John Reed: There's a foreman of a logging camp, he's trying to hire a crew. You know, and he goes down a long line of very big men and he gets to a little man in the back and he says, "Who the hell are you? What're you doing here? Don't you know that I need men who can chop down dozens of trees a day? Where the hell have you ever worked before?" And the little man says, "Well, I worked in the Sahara forest." And the foreman says, "You mean the Sahara desert." And the little man says, "Yes, sure, now!"
- Joe Volski: A man then asks, "Why do you let your beard grow?" He says, "I want to remember what I ate yesterday."
- Louise Bryant: On the subject of decency, Senator, the Bolsheviks took power with the slogan, "an end to the war." Within six months, they made good their promise to the Russian people. Now, the present President of the United States of America went to this country in 1916, on a "no war" ticket. Within six months, he'd taken us into the war, and 115,000 young Americans didn't come back. If that's how decent, God-fearing Christians behave, give me atheists anytime.
- Louise Bryant: By the way, Senator Overman, in Russia, women have the *vote*, which is more than you can say for this country.
- John Reed: I have to go.
- Louise Bryant: You don't have to go. You want to go. You want to go running all over the world ranting and raving and making resolutions and organizing caucuses. What's the difference between the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party except that you're running one and he's running the other?
- John Reed: I've made a commitment.
- Louise Bryant: To what? To the fine distinction between which half of the left of the left is recognized by Moscow as the real Communist Party in America? To petty political squabbling between humorless and hack politicians just wasting their time on left-wing dogma? To getting the endorsement of a committee in Russia you call the international for your group of 14 intellectual friends in the basement who are supposed to tell the workers of this country what they want, whether they want it or not? Write, Jack. You're not a politician, you're a writer. And your writing has done more for the revolution than 20 years of this infighting can do, and you know it.
- Louise Bryant: Gene, if you'd been to Russia, you'd never be cynical about anything again. You would have seen people transformed. Ordinary people.
- Eugene O'Neill: Louise, something in me tightens when an American intellectual's eyes shine and they start to talk to me about the Russian people.
- Louise Bryant: Wait.
- Eugene O'Neill: Something in me says, "Watch it. A new version of Irish Catholicism is being offered for your faith."
- Louise Bryant: It's not like that.
- Eugene O'Neill: And I wonder why a lovely wife like Louise Reed who's just seen the brave new world is sitting around with a cynical bastard like me instead of trotting all over Russia with her idealistic husband. It's almost worth being converted.
- Emma Goldman: Jack, I think we have to face it. The dream that we had is dying in Russia. If Bolshevism means the peasants taking the land, the workers taking the factories, Russia's one place where there's no Bolshevism.
- John Reed: You know, I can argue with cops, I can fight with generals. I can't deal with a bureaucrat.
- Speaker - Liberal Club: Patriotic Americans believe in freedom. And unless we are willing to take arms to defend our heritage, we cannot call ourselves patriotic Americans! I'm proud to be free. I'm proud to be an American.
- Paul Trullinger: Louise, have you taken leave of your senses?
- Louise Bryant: Don't be a fool, Paul.
- Paul Trullinger: You think I'm a fool because I object to my wife being displayed naked in front of half the people I know.
- Louise Bryant: Yes. My God, it's a work of art in a gallery. What's the matter with you? You used to call Portland a stuffy provincial coffin for the mind.
- Paul Trullinger: It's stuffy and provincial, but it also happens to be a coffin where I earn a living.
- Louise Bryant: You can take your living and fill up teeth with it, because I can earn my own living. I have my work.
- Paul Trullinger: Oh, you consider a few articles in the 'Oregonian' and the 'Gazette' work? No, I'll tell you what your work is, Louise. That's making yourself the center of attention. It's shocking Louise Trullinger, emancipated woman of Portland.
- Emma Goldman: The conversation is over. You're a journalist, Jack. When you're a revolutionary, we'll discuss priorities. Hopefully over coffee.
- Emma Goldman: Suddenly I'm dogmatic? Why does my status change every time you get a new woman, Jack?
- John Reed: All I'm saying is that this is not the right time to go to jail for birth control.
- Emma Goldman: Oh, there's a right time to go to jail for birth control?
- Louise Bryant: Look at me. Oh, God! I'm like a wife. I'm like a boring, clinging, miserable little wife.
- Louise Bryant: I don't know what I'm doing here. I don't know what my purpose is.
- John Reed: Well, tell me what you want.
- Louise Bryant: I want to stop needing you!
- Pete Van Wherry: The IWW's a bunch of Reds. Come on! We got Reds in the IWW, got Reds in the Village. We've got nothing but Reds around here.
- John Reed: It's the truth. Does that mean anything around here?
- Pete Van Wherry: Well, who the hell's to say what the truth is?
- John Reed: Why do you even expect to be taken seriously if you're not writing about serious things? I don't understand that.
- Louise Bryant: Jack and I are both perfectly capable of living with our beliefs. But I think someone as romantic as you would be destroyed by them. And I don't want that to happen. It would upset Jack too much.