“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love — they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

—Harry Lime, from The Third Man

Harry Lime is one of my absolute favorite movie villains, and this line is the best in the movie.

Graham Greene himself said that, that it was the best line in his movie, and that Orson Welles came up with it himself the night before shooting. Welles later said that Alsatians invented the clock, but if he’d told an audience that, they’d be busy wondering about dogs and miss the point. When Welles said that, he knew quite well that the clock had been invented in Lorraine.

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