Carol for Another Christmas (1964 TV Movie)

Pat Hingle: Ghost of Christmas Present

Quotes 

• [the Ghost of Christmas Present gorges himself at a banquet table, while barbed wired keeps out starving refugees] 

  Daniel Grudge : Nothing on this earth can force me to eat while starving people watch me.

  Ghost of Christmas Present : Watching makes all the difference. What? You never saw them while tearing into your mashed potatoes. They weren't actually there when you buttered your bread.

  [he snaps his fingers, the lights go out and the refugees disappear] 

  Ghost of Christmas Present : There. Better, Mr. Grudge? Appetite back?

• Ghost of Christmas Present : 60,000 Limeys die in Flanders. 100,000 Frogs catch it at Verdun. The Germans march through Belgium. And Austria declares war on Japan. But, who cares? It's a nice Summer. And Boston's gonna win the World Series. So, we'll rock on the front porch and swat flies.

• Ghost of Christmas Present : You want to know something, Pal? That ocean, you call a fence, keeps nothing out anymore - except fish. It's a lousy stream of water now. It's about as wide as a ditch. A couple of supersonic bombers can spit over it. An ICBM will leave it behind. You don't want to get involved. Sport, you got a job ahead of you. You really got a job. You got to disinvent the airplane and the missile and the submarine and a little ole thing called: the bomb.

• Ghost of Christmas Present : Mankind includes extremes, Mr. Grudge. Extremes! Its some people living alone in a 24 room house and 24 others living in one room. Some eating high off the hog and some - simply not eating at all. Not at all.

• Ghost of Christmas Present : You're going to have to explain the logic of man to me, Mr. Grudge. For example, tell me how you come about your selective morality. Disease with which you strip off your conscience like an overcoat - and let your satisfied belch, drown out the hunger cries that fill the air around you. How do you create the exact science were by you disinvolve yourself from all the anguish of the world that doesn't happen to be in your direct line of vision? That doesn't take a special breed of man at all, Mr. Grudge. That is man in his normal condition.

• Ghost of Christmas Present : I'm the Ghost of Christmas Present.

  Daniel Grudge : Representing what? Gluttony?

  Ghost of Christmas Present : If you like. No, I represent the human race, Mr. Grudge. So does a certain extent, gluttony. Also starvation. I represent that too. You might say that I'm as close to being a walking, eating image of the human race as possible for a man or phantom to be. Part of me feels a gnawing hunger. Part of me is satiating. I'm warm, contented, healthy; but, much of me shivers in the cold.

• Ghost of Christmas Present : Mankind, Mr. Grudge. In there. The hungry part of mankind. The anguished part. The dispossessed. If you shared a loaf of bread with them, how would you be relinquishing your freedom? Or if you joined other nations to administer vaccinations to their children, how would you have desecrated your flag? Or, if you had offered them solace and hope and comfort, how would you have made yourself susceptible to tyranny?

  Daniel Grudge : What are they singing?

  Ghost of Christmas Present : Foreign words. But not necessarily conspiracies to destroy you, Mr. Grudge. Just Christmas songs and of those who do not celebrate Christmas, songs of hope.

• Ghost of Christmas Present : You are all mankind; because, you are a part of mankind.