The History Boys
Movie Quote Quiz

Dakin: What happened with Hector? On the bike?
Scripps: As per. Except I managed to get my bag down. I think he thought he'd got me going. In fact it was my Tudor Economic Documents, Volume 2.

Mrs. Lintott: History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.

Dakin: I just wanted to say thank you.
Scripps: So? Give him a subscription to The Spectator or a box of Black Magic. Just because you've got a scholarship doesn't mean you've got to give him unfettered access to your dick.

Mrs. Lintott: Durham was very good for history. It's where I had my first pizza. Other things too, of course, but it's the pizza that stands out.

Dakin: Don't think we're shocked by your mentioning the word "foreskin," sir.
Crowther: No, sir. Some of us even have them.
Lockwood: Not Posner though, 'cause he's, well, Jewish. It's one of several things he doesn't have.
Posner: Fuck off.
Lockwood: That's not racist, though.
Crowther: No?
Lockwood: It's race-related... but not racist.

Mrs. Lintott: Can you, for a moment, imagine how depressing it is to teach five centuries of masculine ineptitude?

Hector: The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.

Scripps: No more genital massage as one speeds along leafy suburban roads. No more the bike's melancholy long withdrawing roar as he dropped you at the corner, your honour still intact.

Mrs. Lintott: The smallest of incidents... the junction of a dizzying range of alternatives... any one of which could have had a different outcome.

Scripps: Love can be very irritating.
Posner: How do you know?
Scripps: That's what I always think about God. Must get so pissed off, everybody adoring him all the time.
Posner: Yes, only you don't catch God poncing about in his underpants.

Wilkes: You're letting yourself down. You're letting God down.
Lockwood: What's God got to do with it?
Wilkes: Listen, boy. This isn't your body.
Lockwood: No?
Wilkes: This body is on loan to you from God.
Lockwood: Fuck me.
Wilkes: I heard that. Give me twenty.
Lockwood: Twenty what, Hail Marys?
Wilkes: Do it.

Rudge: I did all the other stuff like Stalin was a sweetie and Wilfred Owen was a wuss.

Tom Irwin: But this is History. Distance yourselves. Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground. We don't see it, and because we don't see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past. And one of the historian's jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be... even on the Holocaust.

Hector: Pass the parcel. That's sometimes all you can do. Take it, feel it and pass it on. Not for me, not for you, but for someone, somewhere, one day. Pass it on, boys. That's the game I want you to learn. Pass it on.

Hector: At school you don't get parole. Good behavior just brings a longer sentence.

Dakin: I'm just kicking the tyres on this one but, further to the drink, what I was really wondering was whether there were any circumstances in which there was any chance of your sucking me off... Or something similar... Actually, that would please Hector.
Tom Irwin: What?
Dakin: "Your sucking me off." It's a gerund. He likes gerunds. And "your being scared shitless", that's another gerund.

Factual error: The film was set in 1983. Near the beginning when the boys are in their library you can see a copy of the thick book "Hitler and Stalin, Parallel Lives". This book was first published in 1991.

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