Orson Welles credited as playing...
Kane
- Susan Alexander Kane: I don't know many people.
- Kane: I know too many people. I guess we're both lonely.
- Kane: You know, Mr. Thatcher, if I hadn't been very rich, I might have been a really great man.
- Walter Parks Thatcher: Don't you think you are?
- Kane: I think I did pretty well under the circumstances.
- Walter Parks Thatcher: What would you like to have been?
- Kane: Everything you hate.
- Mr. Bernstein: There's a lot of statues in Europe you haven't bought yet.
- Kane: You can't blame me. They've been making statues for some two thousand years, and I've only been collecting for five.
- Kane: [his answer to being blackmailed] There's only one person in the world who's going to decide what I'm going to do and that's me...
- Kane: You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars *next* year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... sixty years.
- Kane: Hello, Jedediah.
- Jedediah Leland: Hello, Charlie. I didn't know we were speaking...
- Kane: Sure, we're speaking, Jedediah: you're fired.
- Emily Monroe Norton Kane: He happens to be the president, Charles, not you.
- Kane: That's a mistake that will be corrected one of these days.
- [Susan is leaving Kane]
- Kane: [pleading] Don't go, Susan. You mustn't go. You can't do this to me.
- Susan Alexander Kane: I see. So it's *you* who this is being done to. It's not me at all. Not how I feel. Not what it means to me.
- [Susan laughs]
- Susan Alexander Kane: I can't do this to you?
- [Susan smiles coldly]
- Susan Alexander Kane: Oh, yes I can.
- Kane: Mr. Carter, here's a three-column headline in the Chronicle. Why hasn't the Inquirer a three-column headline?
- Herbert Carter: The news wasn't big enough.
- Kane: Mr. Carter, if the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough.
- Mr. Bernstein: That's right, Mr. Kane.
- Walter Parks Thatcher: You're too old to be calling me Mr. Thatcher, Charles.
- Kane: You're too old to be called anything else.
- Kane: Are we going to declare war on Spain, or are we not?
- Jedediah Leland: The Inquirer already has.
- Kane: [jokingly] You long-faced, overdressed anarchist!
- Jedediah Leland: I am *not* overdressed!
- Kane: You are too! Mr. Bernstein, look at his necktie!
- Kane: [to Thatcher] The trouble is, you don't realize you're talking to two people. As Charles Foster Kane, who has eighty-two thousand six hundred thirty-four shares of Public Transit Preferred. You see, I do have a general idea of my holdings. I sympathize with you. Charles Foster Kane is a scoundrel. His paper should be run out of town. A committee should be formed to boycott him. You may, if you can form such a committee, put me down for a contribution of on thousand dollars. On the other hand, I am the publisher of the Inquirer! As such, it's my duty - and I'll let you in on a little secret, it's also my pleasure - to see to it that decent, hard-working people in this community aren't robbed blind by a pack of money-mad pirates just because - they haven't anybody to look after their interests.
- Kane: This gentleman was saying...
- James W. Gettys: I am not a gentleman. I don't even know what a gentleman is.
- Kane: Read the cable.
- Mr. Bernstein: "Girls delightful in Cuba. Stop. Could send you prose poems about scenery, but don't feel right spending your money. Stop. There is no war in Cuba, signed Wheeler." Any answer?
- Kane: Yes. "Dear Wheeler: you provide the prose poems. I'll provide the war."