Most Quotable Movie Quote of All Time Bracket!

You’ve waited all year and the time is here! That’s right, it’s time for March Madness and lots of talk about brackets! But if you are here to read about college basketball brackets, you are in the wrong place (although I’m always happy to talk about college basketball as well). This year’s bracket, though, is focused on something I think we all can relate to, movie quotes. Movie quotes have made an indelible impact on our culture and I’m sure we’ve all had moments in which we’ve explained to someone what spirit fingers are or casually mentioned that you’ll be back in your best Austrian accent. And that’s the power of a good movie quote, that it can infiltrate our common vernacular and become part of our everyday lexicon. That’s really just a fancy way of saying that it has become quotable in everyday contexts and a majority of people understand what you are talking about.


As I was putting this bracket together I kept going back and forth about the direction I wanted to go. Should I focus on quotes that are most impactful in the movies in which they appear? Or quotes that historians have labeled as the best of all time? The more I poured through various lists of best quotes of all time, the more I realized many of these lists lacked a quintessential element of a good movie quote, how quotable it is in everyday life. So as much as I wanted to honor the history of film through quotes, I more so wanted to know what quotes are the most quotable. This year’s bracket attempts to determine what is the most quotable movie quote of all time.


As far as creating the bracket is concerned, there was no completely scientific way to do it. I couldn’t create a perfectly objective quotability score to assign each quote and the metrics I had to work with focused on the movies themselves, not the individual quotes. But I was determined, so I poured through lists of quotes online and used those rankings to start creating my own rankings. Then I started making some executive decisions, starting with only allowing one quote per movie. I figured that was fair to ensure more movies would be represented. And I made sure to separate quotes from the same actor or the same franchise into different regions. As my list and rankings started coming together more, I started moving quotes up and down on the list based on my own judgements and experiences with each quote. It was difficult to leave some quotes out and even more difficult to seed the remaining quotes. When narrowing down almost 100 years of movie quotes to 64, some very good ones are going to be left out, and some of those that get in are going to be seeded low. I fully expect people to be upset about the seeding and have some favorites that were omitted. I always like to hear where you think I went wrong and I welcome those friendly debates.


But enough of the boring stuff, let’s get to the voting! Here are the matchups in Round 1. The goal is to determine the most quotable quote of all time, but feel free to vote however you see fit. You can see the entire bracket below as well. And please feel free to share with friends and family.