Quotes / Evil Old Folks

---

Film — Live-Action

Billy Costigan: You're seventy fucking years old. One of these guys is going to pop you. As for running drugs, what the fuck? You don't need the pain in the ass, and they're going to catch you. And you don't need the money.
Frank Costello: I haven't "needed the money" since I took Archie's milk money in the third grade. Tell you the truth, I don't need pussy any more either. But I like it.

— The Departed

Literature

And you that sit by the fire are young,
And true love waits for you
But the king and I grow old, grow old,
And hate alone is true.

— Ogier, The Ballad of the White Horse

The old men from the charity hospital next door would come jerking past our rooms, making useless, disjointed leaps. They'd go from room to room, spitting out gossip between their decayed teeth, purveying scraps of malignant worn-out slander...They employed their last quavering energies in hurting each other a little more. In destroying what little pleasure they had left. Their last remaining pleasure! Their shriveled carcasses contained not one solitary atom that was not absolutely vicious!

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

ANNE, YOUR FATHER IS DEAD.
She did not let him hear the sob in the back of her throat. She swallowed it, and went on. "I know. I suppose you want the credit, old man. It wasn't you. It was just old age. You ought to know something about that. How are the arteries, then? Hardening nicely? How many more skins can you get rid of before there's nothing left of you?"
ANNE, I'M FOREVER.
"Like Hell."
YES, LIKE HELL.

— Bad Dreams

"Always remember," she used to say, far too often, "that it only needs one hundred and thirty-eight people to die, and your father will be King! And that means that one day, you might be Queen!"
Grandmother used to say this with a look in her eye that suggested that she was planning 138 murders, and you didn't have to know the old lady for very long to suspect that she'd be quite capable of arranging them.

— Nation

His hair and beard were a yellowed white and were very long. His face was deeply lined, and his eyes glittered in their sockets. It was a face filled with an ancient and profound evil. Cruelty and arrogance had eroded all traces of decency or humanity from it, and a towering egotism had twisted it into a perpetual sneer of contempt for every other living thing.

— Magician's Gambit on Ctuchik, The Belgariad

Live-Action TV

Kodos: Blood thins. The body fails. One is finally grateful for a failing memory. I no longer treasure life, not even my own. I am tired! And the past is a blank. Did you get everything you wanted, Captain Kirk?
Kirk: If I had gotten everything I wanted, you might not walk out of this room alive.

— Star Trek: The Original Series, "The Conscience of the King"

"I might look like a nice old man, but I assure you, Michael, I'm not."

— Management, Burn Notice ("The Devil You Know")

Cigarette-Smoking Man: It's a scary story. You wanna come sit on my lap?
Scully: You don't scare me.
Cigarette-Smoking Man: My story's scared every President since Truman in '47.

— The X-Files, "The Truth"

Magazines

His Don is a primitive sacred monster, and the more powerful because he suggests not the strapping sacred monsters of movies but actual ones—those old men who carry never-ending grudges and ancient hatreds inside a frail frame, those monsters who remember minute details of old business deals when they can no longer tie their shoelaces.

— Pauline Kael on The Godfather, The New Yorker

Web Original

Chris: Meanwhile, the guard that smacked around Magneto has gone directly from his job at a high-security government installation to a bar, where he is easily seduced by Mystique, who has turned herself into Sexy Rebecca Romijn.
Matt: I know a bar is directly where I’d go if I had to do that guy’s job.
Chris: Yeah, I guess having to beat up a Holocaust survivor all day is a pretty good reason to drink.

— Chris Sims and David Uzumeri on X2: X-Men United

Hey, Bud Adams died! Well played, Titans! I'll miss the old man lumbering around and flipping double birds to random passersby. Of course, being an NFL owner means you automatically get a series of fawning obituaries when you die. Even if you move your team out of Houston and hoodwink some glorified exurb like Nashville into building you a new stadium by jacking up local property taxes, you still get a death notice usually reserved for heads of state. THIS MAN WAS A GIANT OF THE GAME.

— Drew Magary

There’s this idea that old people aren’t proper people, that they’ve always been old. White, ghostly hair; face drooping downward in innocent folds; fingers gnarled and perpetually cold. It’s hard to connect the shuffling vulnerability with who they were; someone who loved, someone who fought and fucked, who did and felt any of the things ‘real’, young people feel, right now. In Killing‘s subjects, it’s instinctive to be similarly conflicted, when faced with smiling elderly men who’ve tortured and killed thousands, and are revered as heroes.

— Stuart Millard on The Act of Killing (2013)

During the four-day-long deposition, Bill came off as a dirty old manipulative skeezer turtle who used his fame, promises of mentorship and sedatives to get with younger women...Cosby casually talked about all the women he “seduced” and bragged that he was a good “reader” of people and their sexual emotions. Andrea Constand’s lawyer noted that Cosby made a lot of jokes and took the allegations as seriously as I took high school math class.

— Michael K., "An excuse to dunk your head in a giant pot full of boiling ammonia"

Web Video

"It turns out you were just like your sweater: monstrous!"

—Joan Rivers to Bill Cosby, Epic Rap Battles of History

Real Life

"Many foxes grow gray, but few grow good."

— Benjamin Franklin

---