"Saigon... shit; I'm still only in Saigon... Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back in the jungle."

"When I was home after my first tour, it was worse. I'd wake up and there'd be nothing. I hardly said a word to my wife, until I said 'yes' to a divorce."

"When I was here, I wanted to be there; when I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle."

"I'm here a week now... waiting for a mission... getting softer. Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger."

"Each time I looked around the walls moved in a little tighter."

"Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service."

"It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I never wanted another."

"Terminate with extreme prejudice."

"You understand, Captain, that this mission does not exist, nor will it ever exist."

"He's out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct. And he is still in the field commanding troops."

"Walter Kurtz was one of the most outstanding officers this country's ever produced. He was brilliant. He was outstanding in every way. And he was a good man, too. A humanitarian man. A man of wit and humor."

"He joined the Special Forces, and after that, his ideas, methods, became - unsound. Unsound."

"Every man has got a breaking point. You have and I have them. Walter Kurtz has reached his. And, very obviously, he has gone insane."

"Captain, I don't know how you feel about this shrimp, but if you eat it, you'll never have to prove your courage in any other way."

"Well, you see, Willard, in this war, things get confused out there. Power, ideals, the old morality, and practical military necessity. But out there with these natives, it must be a temptation to be God."

"Because there's a conflict in every human heart, between the rational and irrational, between good and evil. And good does not always triumph. Sometimes, the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature."

"Smell that? You smell that?"

"Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that."

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning."

"You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' dink body."

"The smell, you know that gasoline smell? The whole hill. Smelled like... victory."

"Someday this war's gonna end."

"Charlie don't surf!"

"If I say its safe to surf this beach, Captain, then its safe to surf this beach!"

"I'm not afraid to surf this place, I'll surf this whole fucking place!"

"I will not hurt or harm you. Just give me back the board, Lance. It was a good board and I like it."

"You can either surf, or you can fight!"

"The bullshit piled up so fast in Vietnam, you needed wings to stay above it."

"No wonder Kurtz put a weed up Command's ass. The war was being run by a bunch of four star clowns who were gonna end up giving the whole circus away."

"If that's how Kilgore fought the war, I began to wonder what they really had against Kurtz. It wasn't just insanity and murder; there was enough of that to go around for everyone."

"Never get out of the boat. Absolutely goddamn right! Unless you were goin' all the way. Kurtz got off the boat. He split from the whole fuckin' program."

"The machinist, the one they called Chef, was from New Orleans. He was wrapped too tight for Vietnam; probably wrapped too tight for New Orleans."

"Lance, on the forward .50s, was a famous surfer from the beaches south of LA. One look at him and you wouldn't believe he ever fired a weapon in his whole life."

"Clean... Mr. Clean... was from some South Bronx shithole and the light and space of Vietnam really put the zap on his head."

"Then there was Phillips, the Chief. It might have been my mission, but it sure as shit was the Chief's boat!"

"The crew were mostly just kids. Rock 'n' rollers with one foot in their graves."

"My orders say I'm not supposed to know where I'm taking this boat, so I don't! But one look at you, and I know it's gonna be hot!"

"That's Cambodia, captain."

"That's classified. We're not supposed to be in Cambodia, but that's where I'm going."

"How come all you guys sit on your helmets?"

"So we don't get our balls blown off."

"I was supposed to go to Paris, study at the Escoffier School. That's when I got my orders. Well, I joined the Navy. Heard they had better food."

"I was going to the worst place in the world and I didn't even know it yet."

"Weeks away and hundreds of miles up a river that snaked through the war like a main circuit cable plugged straight into Kurtz."

"It was no accident that I got to be the caretaker of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz's memory any more than being back in Saigon was an accident."

"There is no way to tell his story without telling my own. And if his story really is a confession, then so is mine."

"Part of me was afraid of what I would find and what I would do when I got there. I knew the risks, or imagined I knew. But the thing I felt the most, much stronger than fear, was the desire to confront him."

"He was one of those guys that had that weird light around him. You just knew he wasn't going to get so much as a scratch here."

"This is the end, beautiful friend."

"You're in the asshole of the world, Captain!"

"I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream; that's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor... and surviving."

"We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write 'fuck' on their airplanes because it's obscene!"

"I've seen horrors... horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that... but you have no right to judge me."

"It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means."

"Horror... Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror."

"Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies!"

"I remember when I was with Special Forces... seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see."

"We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms."

"And I remember... I... I... I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn't know what I wanted to do!"

"And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it... I never want to forget."

"And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead."

"And I thought, my God... the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure."

"And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men... trained cadres."

"These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love... but they had the strength... the strength... to do that."

"If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly."

"You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgment... without judgment! Because it's judgment that defeats us."

"It's judgment that defeats us."

"Did they say why, Willard, why they want to terminate my command?"

"I was sent on a classified mission, sir."

"It's no longer classified, is it? Did they tell you?"

"They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound."

"Are my methods unsound?"

"I don't see any method at all, sir."

"I expected someone like you. What did you expect? Are you an assassin?"

"I'm a soldier."

"You're neither. You're an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill."

"I worry that my son might not understand what I've tried to be. And if I were to be killed, Willard, I would want someone to go to my home and tell my son everything."

"Everything I did, everything you saw, because there's nothing that I detest more than the stench of lies. And if you understand me, Willard, you will do this for me."

"I am beyond their timid lying morality, and so I am beyond caring."

"We must kill them. We must incinerate them. Pig after pig. Cow after cow. Village after village. Army after army. And they call me an assassin. What do you call it when the assassins accuse the assassin?"

"They lie. They lie, and we have to be merciful, for those who lie. Those nabobs. I hate them. I do hate them."

"Have you ever considered any real freedoms? Freedom from the opinions of others... even the opinions of yourself?"

"I went down that river once when I was a kid. There's a place in the river. I can't remember. Must have been a gardenia plantation at one time. All wild and overgrown now, but for about five miles you'd think that heaven just fell on the earth in the form of gardenias."

"Where are you from, Willard?"

"I'm from Ohio, sir."

"Were you born there?"

"Yes, sir."

"Whereabouts?"

"Toledo, sir."

"How far are you from the river?"

"The Ohio River, sir?"

"Uh-huh."

"About 200 miles."

"The horror! The horror!"

"Hey, man, you don't talk to the Colonel. You listen to him. The man's enlarged my mind."

"He's a poet warrior in the classic sense."

"I'm a little man, I'm a little man, he's... he's a great man!"

"I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas."

"Do you know that 'if' is the middle word in life? If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you..."

"This is the way the fucking world ends! Look at this fucking shit we're in, man! Not with a bang, but with a whimper. And with a whimper, I'm fucking splitting, Jack."