Neil: So what are you going to do? Charlie? Dalton: Damn it Neil, the name is Nuwanda.
John Keating: Language was developed for one endeavor, and that is - Mr. Anderson? Come on, are you a man or an amoeba? [pause] John Keating: Mr. Perry? Neil: To communicate. John Keating: No! To woo women!
Neil: For the first time in my whole life, I know what I wanna do! And for the first time, I'm gonna do it! Whether my father wants me to or not! Carpe diem!
[after hearing "The Introduction to Poetry"] John Keating: Excrement! That's what I think of Mr. J. Evans Pritchard! We're not laying pipe! We're talking about poetry. How can you describe poetry like American Bandstand? "I like Byron, I give him a 4...
John Keating: I SOUND MY BARBARIC YAWP OVER THE ROOFTOPS OF THE WORLD.
Hopkins: [reading his poem] "The cat sat on the mat" John Keating: Congratulations, Mr. Hopkins. You have the first poem to ever have a negative score on the Pritchard scale.
Dalton: I'm exercising the right not to walk.
Dalton: Gentlemen, what are the Four Pillars? Dalton, Meeks, Neil, Knox, Todd Anderson: Travesty. Horror. Decadence. Excrement.
Meeks: I'll try anything once. Dalton: Except sex.
John Keating: I always thought the idea of education was to learn to think for yourself. Nolan: At these boys' age? Not on your life!
John Keating: Mr. Meeks, time to inherit the earth.
Nolan: Free thinkers at 17?
[the students are climbing onto Keating's desk to see a new perspective] John Keating: Now, don't just walk off the edge like lemmings! Look around you!
Neil: If I don't ask him, at least I won't be disobeying him.
Pitts: Too bad. Knox: It's worse than "Too bad," Pittsie. It's a tragedy. A girl this beautiful in love with such a jerk. Pitts: All the good ones go for jerks. You know that.
Knox: The point, Charlie... is... that she was thinking about me. I've only met her once, and already she's thinking about me.
John Keating: Mr. Anderson! Don't think that I don't know that this assignment scares the hell out of you, you mole!
John Keating: I was the intellectual equivalent of a 98-pound weakling! I would go to the beach and people would kick copies of Byron in my face!
