John Rhys-Davies quotes:

Spying is a like a game of chess: Sometimes you have to withdraw, sometimes you have to sacrifice one of your pieces to win - preferably a knight rather than a king or queen.

I'd love to spend more time on the Isle of Man. I love the anonymity of putting on a boiler suit and going down to buy parts for the compressor. And Norman Wisdom's a neighbour; I salute him occasionally.

Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg are men at the top of their game, and Jackson especially is going to change the nature of film-making.

Villains are a lot of fun. My villains have a lot of tongue-in-cheek. They are sometimes conscious of and a little bit gleeful of their villainy.

As I come towards the end of my life, you get to see things in a slightly different perspective.

Id love to spend more time on the Isle of Man. I love the anonymity of putting on a boiler suit and going down to buy parts for the compressor. And Norman Wisdoms a neighbour; I salute him occasionally.

Indiana Jones' wasn't physically tough, but they are the only two films I've ever been ill on. On 'The Last Crusade,' I got sciatica. That's when the sciatic nerve, which goes through the funny hole in your pelvis down your leg, swells and rubs against the nerves.

The universe starts off with the Big Bang theory, and the first thing that emerged from the Big Bang is essentially hydrogen and then helium. And that's what combusts in stars. Finally, stars implode, and they build heavier elements out of that. And those heavier elements are reconstituted in the heart of other stars, eventually.

We live in a modest system, a galaxy called the Milky Way. If we named every star in the Milky Way and put them in the Hollywood telephone directory and stacked those telephone directories up, we'd have a pile of telephone directories 70 miles high.

Western Europeans are not having any babies.

Given the fact that I have a family and responsibilities, it's the mark of a man to find the courage to do what is right in the face of oppressive evil.

Hollywood is a far safer place to work than working abroad, because of the skill level, and because of the safety considerations that experience and unionization have created.

I am a believer in the evolutionary process, and yet I have sympathy for the friends of mine who are creationists. I don't find the positions incompatible.

The script of 'Shogun' was so tight that you could not take a word out of a sentence, you could not take a sentence out of a scene, and you certainly couldn't take out a scene without putting ripples right through the back or the front of the overall story.

Faith is not a rational thing, and yet to understand the universe, rationality alone will not give it to us. Our understanding of the universe must transcend the rational.

I found it marvelous that the great supporters of America in Europe are, of course, those countries that American consistency and firmness in the Cold War ended up liberating.

I do not want to see a society where, should I ever have any, my granddaughters have their fingernails pulled out because they are wearing nail varnish.

I think 'The Lost World' could've been a successful movie except for the fact that it pre-dated the good special effects and computer graphics.

I can't give a soundbite for love or money.

No one should be allowed to stand for Parliament without proof that he has taken responsibility for other people.

I think your children are your measure of success, regardless of work and career.

Actually, I'm addicted to science fiction. Let me make my diction clear - I love sci-fi.

Unkindness is quite a major sin.

To be an actor for 30-odd years trying to become recognized, and to end up playing a full prosthetic and a character 3 foot 9', or something like that, is... well, it just shows that you can get actors to do anything.

Many do not understand how precarious Western civilization is and what a joy it is. From it, we get real democracy. From it, we get the sort of intellectual tolerance that allows me to propound something that may be completely alien to you.

Actors are always looking for actor-proof parts. A part so good you can't screw it up!

There's nothing like the discipline of having to work on a cold film set on the Danubian plain in Bulgaria. Boy, does it get cold.

When you think about a walking tree, laughter is the response.

I hate being out of work!

I've always been attracted to films which explore the qualities of courage.

Actors endow the villain in fiction with a warmth and quality that makes them memorable. I think we like fictional villains because they're the Mr. Hyde of our own dreams. I've met a few real villains in my time, and they weren't the least bit sympathetic.

To experience the unique sense of elation that you have when your child is sleeping on your chest in an incomparable emotion.

I count myself a a rationalist and a skeptic with a very conscious awareness of my indebtedness to Western Christian civilization, and I am a fairly passionate defender of it.

When I looked further into my mother's history, I realised that her anxieties and her neuroses could be accounted for by facts from a very early age. Her parents, William Henry Jones and Sarah Emily, were desperately poor.

In the film world, we can all be heroes. In the real world, where heroism can cost you your life or the life of the ones you love, people aren't so willing to make those sacrifices. When they do, they are set apart from the rest of us.

When you get back to fundamental questions - 'Why should anything exist?' A, I'm not sure what the answer is in terms of the science, and B, I'm not sure that science can even ask that question.

The word 'career' and 'actor' really don't fit in the same paragraph, let alone sentence. There is no career structure for actors.

When you've opened your heart to a child as you have to, there's always the fear that you may discover that the child is not viable. Losing that child is not a position you want to find yourself in.

I was offered the opportunity to narrate the Catholic bible, and it was something I really wanted to be involved with.

I like heroes, and would like to be a hero myself. I suppose we all want that.

My parents were always Welsh-speaking and very proud of Wales.

Sometimes you learn more from films that aren't terribly successful and, indeed, sometimes you learn more from real disasters than you do from the ones that succeed.

I used to fly airplanes myself, so being above the ground doesn't worry me too much.

If you cannot have fun on a set and enjoy what you're doing, you're better off giving it up.

To be an actor for 30-odd years trying to become recognized, and to end up playing a full prosthetic and a character 3 foot 9"², or something like that, is... well, it just shows that you can get actors to do anything.

I enjoy acting. It's not that I begin to think I'm getting better. I now fully know that I've made no improvement whatsoever since I was 20. I can live with it.