- Rémy: Love - the kind that makes your heart race - lasts two years at best. Then the compromises begin.
- Rémy: Three things are important in History. First of all, numbers... secondly, numbers... and thirdly, numbers.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: Is the frantic drive for personal happiness we see in society today, linked to the decline of the American empire as we are now experiencing it?
- Louise: Oh, to be slim, young, and attractive. I'm forever on a diet. I weigh myself every morning. I'm terrified of getting flabby. You know what? My problem is I was born in the wrong era. I was made to be fat.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: It's my premise that the concept of personal happiness permeates the literature of a nation or civilization as its influence wanes.
- Pierre: If I'm in love, I get hard. If I don't get hard, I'm not in love. Otherwise, you're deceiving yourself. Like a woman who says she still loves you when she's as dry as sandpaper, and you remember how she'd be dripping if you so much as kissed her on the neck.
- Louise: [describing an orgy] Well, it was for married couples.
- Diane Leonard: [laughing] Married?
- Louise: That's right. These people are absolutely faithful, do everything together. For me it was... a way of showing our love.
- Pierre: I know I'll never be a Toynbee or a Braudel. All I have left is... sex... or love. What's the difference? I don't know what's left for me. That's why age leads to vice.
- Claude: The only time I feel alive is when I'm cruising. It's incredible, I become... crazed... electrified...
- Rémy: History is not a moral science. Legality, compassion, justice... such notions are foreign to history.
- Rémy: She was brilliant. That's what seduction's about... not big breasts or long legs. It's in the mind.
- Diane Leonard: [describing her current relationship] But I have to stop, because... it's getting dangerous.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: You're afraid of him?
- Diane Leonard: No, it's me I'm afraid of.
- Diane Leonard: Such simple souls, they shout 'Mamma' when they come.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: Yes, that's right. The first time a man shouted 'Mamma,' 'Mamma mia!', I thought his mother had come in. I wanted to hide under the bed.
- Louise: Making love is the only exercise I really enjoy. After 15 years of marriage, I can't rely on it to keep in shape.
- Claude: I'm not physically brave... but when it hits I can set out at 4 a.m. on an expedition... through the saunas of Los Angeles... or the heaviest bars in St. Pauli in Hamburg. That's why I live alone. I never know how the day will end. Even if nothing happens... the possibility still exists. Knowing I have to be home at 6, 'cause the old lady has supper waiting... would kill me.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: A civilization's decline is as inevitable as old age. We can try to slow down the process. That's all.
- Danielle: Reporters get all worked up because of 10% unemployment. When we think about London back in 1850 having a population of millions, 600,000 people were literally starving to death. That's what I like about history, it's so reassuring.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: Marx was your average middle-class German who fucked the maid behind his wife's back. His theories are rooted in his sense of guilt. Same for Freud. A latent homosexual... unable to lay his wife after age 40... hot and bothered over his female patients. His quarrels with Jung... were really about women... about sex.
- Louise: [responding to a theory that civilization is declining] Well, I don't agree. I'm sure there are experts who can prove just the opposite... that we're living in an age of incredible rebirth, that science has never progressed so fast, that life has never been better.
- Pierre: That's when it happened. I fell head over heels in love. Ejaculating while discussing the millennium was intellectually and physically overwhelming.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: [referring to Canada] We're fortunate here to be on the outskirts of the empire. The shocks are less violent. Life in these times can be very pleasant in some respects.
- Rémy: To be happy, I'd need four wives. Four, exactly as the Koran says. I'm very happy with Louise but I'd also take a writer, say Susan Sontag, an Olympic high jumper, and a real sex maniac for group encounters.
- Louise: Better to have kids who love you than to end up like Pierre, alone, bitter, without any family.
- Pierre: But I do have a family. Here, sitting around this table. A family I love. I feel closer to this family than to my brother the insurance broker, or my parents who could never figure me out, and complain 'cause I don't go to mass. You're my family.
- Rémy: Then you have to make her come. No piece of cake. You have to find her clitoris. A delicate undertaking! Like looking for a needle in a haystack. You rack your brains to recall Masters and Johnson, Shere Hite, the G-spot debate, Germaine Greer, Nancy Friday. Should you use your fingers, tongue, or prick?
- Pierre: I get a kick out of eminent sociologists and psychologists who spew forth theories of sexuality, when I've seen them being flogged with wet towels in a massage parlor.
- Diane Leonard: History is criticized for dealing only with the victors. Often this is due to the documents available. There are more records about Egyptians than Nubians, more about Spaniards than Mayas, and of course, many more records about men than women. This limitation to History is very real. There is perhaps also a psychological reason. We far prefer hearing about winners than about losers.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: You should write a paper on that.
- Pierre: 17,000 scholarly articles are published every day. One more or less...
- Pierre: Want me to describe a female fantasy? The female fantasy? The woman is at home in the nest she has so lovingly decorated. Her husband or lover arrives. He's brought flowers and a bottle of champagne. He is extremely nice. They spend a pleasant evening... and make love. End of fantasy. What a bore.
- Louise: It's impossible to understand the age you live in. All you can do is try to be happy. That's what people have always wanted. The rest invent theories to justify their misery.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: [describing Rémy's sex life] Anyone in a skirt at school... down to the last secretary. And then there are all the others. He told me he laid Louise's sister and really got off on it.
- Alain: But he's not that handsome.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: Doesn't mean a thing. He loves sex. That's irresistible. So many men don't really enjoy it.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: It's one thing I can't stomach.
- Alain: What?
- Dominique St. Arnaud: Blindness. People who are unable to see reality.
- Louise: Just because you choose... to live all alone... and sacrifice your life to a career, doesn't mean that if I'm lucid, I have to be depressed.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: Rémy's special... He's screwed all Montreal.
- Alain: He says he's like the Red Cross, a universal donor.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: I just can't take these middle-class housewives with their cute husbands and cute kids. I've watched so many men getting dressed at 2 a.m.
- Pierre: [explaining why he doesn't want to have kids] You have to like yourself to procreate. I don't. I'm not optimistic enough.
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By what name was The Decline of the American Empire (1986) officially released in India in English?
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