- Roy Marcus Cohn: Senator, I've seen enough names working for Pat McCarran. You're going to be hauling up Jew after Jew... all those European names, and with a McCarthy and a Kennedy together, it's gonna look like an Irish/Catholic-run pogrom. That will discredit everything you do, and I know, because I'm a Jew.
- Senator Joseph McCarthy: But they're Communists. They betrayed the faith of the Fathers for this Socialist God of Iron. Now, that's the issue, not anti-Semitism.
- Roy Marcus Cohn: That's NOT what your opposition will say. It's very hard sometimes to control what an issue really is, and if your enemies can find a way to twist your motives, believe me, they will do it.
- Dora Cohn: You're telling this boy how to live? You are?
- Albert Cohn: That's the idea.
- Dora Cohn: [firmly] Don't. He's MINE. This is one boy they're NEVER going to forget!
- [the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg visits Roy in his deathbed]
- Ethel Rosenberg: Here's a secret, boychick. The electricity makes everything brighter. I could see. All the Jews were afraid because if you could kill me, all the Jews would die.
- Roy Marcus Cohn: [to Peter] They tried to kill me. The bastards didn't make it, though.
- [points to the window]
- Roy Marcus Cohn: What do you see there? You see the SUN! They have this one doctor. They PAID him to kill me. They couldn't do it themselves, the miserable cocksuckers... They got him to do it. You don't think so? My friends hate me. My enemies hate me. Now you hate me. Everybody hates me.
- Peter: [interrupting] You knocked off your enemies a long time ago and your friends love you. You know that.
- [McCarthy and Cohn make a toast]
- Senator Joseph McCarthy: To the birth of Jesus.
- Roy Marcus Cohn: Right. Another tough Jew.
- Roy Marcus Cohn: "Murderer's Row"? Who said that? Who called us that? Who cares. It has a nice ring to it. Anyway, they haven't seen anything yet, have they?
- Roy Marcus Cohn: So what's the indictment, Doctor? Theoretical? Principle? Personal? Give it a name.
- Older Doctor: I don't name names.
- Roy Marcus Cohn: Well, we know them already, so what's the difference?
- Senator Joseph McCarthy: What are you trying to DO to me?
- Roy Marcus Cohn: I'm trying to make a great man out of you.
- Senator Joseph McCarthy: Now, please answer this: are you now, or ever have been, a member of the Communist Party?
- First Annie Lee Moss: No, sir, I'm a Democrat!
- Roy Marcus Cohn: Well, maybe I'm a little nearsighted. I cannot see the picture.
- Joseph N. Welch: Yes, I do believe you have betrayed a certain nearsightedness...
- [the ghost of Joseph Welch speaks to Cohn on his deathbed]
- Joseph N. Welch: Well, how did I do, Mr. Cohn?
- Roy Marcus Cohn: The trial is over. You got McCarthy... but you didn't get me.
- Joseph N. Welch: You think you're on trial here? What would you be on trial for? And might I say, Mr. Cohn, for your sexual predilections I bear no grudge, no malice, nor for the hot, secret practices of your friends, not Mr. Hoover, not His Excellency the Cardinal. But shame, Mr. Cohn, for persecuting in public those who are no different than you.
- Roy Marcus Cohn: [denying] I'm not gay.
- Older Doctor: Suuuure. And you're dying of mumps.
- [Roy Cohn leaves a drunk and censured Senator McCarthy]
- Senator Joseph McCarthy: I always tried to do the right thing.
- Roy Marcus Cohn: The right thing? What a disaster! If for one day, everybody in Washington tried to do the "right thing", you'd come into both Houses of Congress, there'd be mass suicide!
- Senator Joseph McCarthy: Yeah, well, it didn't used to be that way.
- Roy Marcus Cohn: Wait, are you trying to tell me something, Joe? What? What? That I caused this? I didn't invent dirty tricks.
- Senator Joseph McCarthy: [chuckles] No, no, you didn't. You kind of just made them into an art form.
- Congressman Neil Gallagher: Okay Roy, I understand. You don't want Bobby Kennedy in your bedroom uninvited, do you?
- Roy Marcus Cohn: I don't want Bobby Kennedy ANYWHERE.
- [after being paid a complement by an opponent]
- Roy Marcus Cohn: Now I know what a pancake feels like after it's had syrup poured all over it.
- [last lines]
- Older Doctor: Well, at last he did something human. What was he saying?
- Peter: He said "Tell me the name of the judge!"
- Walter Winchell: You hear what I hear? Kennedy's gonna name his brother Attorney General. Our friend J. Edgar says it's gonna be "Get Hoffa and get Cohn." Fuck the little cocksucker, and all the ships at sea.
- Joseph N. Welch: Until this moment, I never really gauged your recklessness, or your cruelty. Fred Fisher is beginning what looks to be a brilliant career with us. And when I asked him to come here and assist us, he told me in college he briefly belonged to the Lawyer's Guild, the organization to which you refer. I told him that, um, I just don't think I'm going to use you on this case, because it might go out on the networks, and that would just hurt like the dickens. So, Senator, I sent him back to Boston. Little did I dream that you would be so cruel, and so reckless as to do injury to this lad. It's true, he works for us. It's true that he will continue to work for us, and it's true I fear he will always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by YOU. Let us not assassinate this lad any further, Senator? You've done enough! Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you NO sense of DECENCY?
- Roy Marcus Cohn: [to the older doctor] You won't try to hurt me. You wanna know why? Because you're STILL afraid of me.
- Roy Marcus Cohn: There are plenty of the shelves by subversives like Dashiel Hammett, but interestingly enough not a SINGLE copy of American Legion magazine!
- [British reporters are laughing at Roy Cohn and David Schine]
- British reporter #1: [laughing] Are we to understand that The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man are actually Maxist propaganda?
- British reporter #2: [mocking] Mr. Cohn, is William Karl Marx or Trotsky would you say?
- British reporter #3: [mocking] Is Asta Lenin or Engels?
- British reporter #2: Mr. Cohn, do you intend to burn the books?
- British reporter #1: [mocking] Mr. Schine, have you READ the books?
- Roy Marcus Cohn: Well, I would say I happen to know that Colonel Bradley had a good steak dinner that night and perhaps he was thinking about that.
- Joseph N. Welch: If Bradley was thinking of a steak, Schine must have been considering a whole haunch of beef, wouldn't he?
- Senator Joseph McCarthy: Hey, you ever listen to Bob and Ray... making fun of me? Awfully, awfully funny.
- Walter Winchell: Barely more than 100,000 votes over 70 million cast. That, Mr. and Mrs. North and South America, is a squeaker. Opinion here? A rich, Irish kid with King Midas for a daddy has just proved that in this country, you can buy anything, including the White House.
- [sour]
- Walter Winchell: Good luck, America.
- Roy Marcus Cohn: Can you, uh... I got to go to court because they're gonna try to disbar me.
- Ethel Rosenberg: The hearings are over, darling, all over.
- Roy Marcus Cohn: Did I win?
- Ethel Rosenberg: No!
- Roy Marcus Cohn: [With disbelief] No? They disbarred me?
- Ethel Rosenberg: Ooh, they did!
- Roy Marcus Cohn: [Incredulously] Unhh?
- Ethel Rosenberg: Why were you so naughty? Why?
- Roy Marcus Cohn: Oh, I don't know!
- Ethel Rosenberg: Why? Why did you get me? Hmmm?
- Roy Marcus Cohn: I...
- Ethel Rosenberg: Because I was a woman?
- Roy Marcus Cohn: No!
- Ethel Rosenberg: Because I was a Jew?
- Roy Marcus Cohn: No! I killed you for the headlines! For the fuckin' headlines!
- Roy Marcus Cohn: We'd like you to describe the apparatus of your organization, those to whom you reported, what they told you to put in your books, others you may have seen at party meetings. And we'll expect you to testify to a certain amount of this in public session.
- Dashiell Hammett: I know what you're thinking about, but it isn't so, no how. Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't That's logic.
- Senator Joseph McCarthy: Very funny.
- Roy Marcus Cohn: Everybody starts out straight. I've never heard of anybody being BORN homosexual, have you? It's just... times goes by and... and sometimes I guess... it happens to them... without knowing it.