Jeremy Rodock: [Explaining to Jocasta why he felt the hanging was necessary] I tell ya' Jo, it's the only way. It's FEAR that keeps men honest. And with that hangin' today, I laid fear like a fence ten feet high, around my property!


--James Cagney (as ) in Tribute to a Bad Man

Jeremy Rodock: [Explaining to Jocasta why he must go search out and hang the horse thieves, in spite of Jo's wishes to the contrary] Jo... you come as close to bein'... well, as close to bein' everything to me as anything livin'. But I still can't do what you want me to do. We're livin' in the middle of nowhere. Two hundred miles from any kind of law and order. Except for what I built myself. Ever since I started - and this you don't know - I've been badgered, skunked, bitten out and bushwhacked by thieves from everywhere. And now, one of my men's been killed. I find my horses, I find the killer. If I find the killer, I hang him. I gotta' keep my own reckoning, Jo. It's the way I built my life and half the transportation of the West. Goodbye, Jo.


--James Cagney (as ) in Tribute to a Bad Man

Jeremy Rodock: [Jeremy to Jocasta as Steve rides away on Jeremy's horse] A fella doesn't die of a broken heart from his first love, only from his last.


--James Cagney (as ) in Tribute to a Bad Man

Jeremy Rodock: One thing you gotta learn tho - horse is man's slave but treat 'em like a slave and you ain't a man.


--James Cagney (as ) in Tribute to a Bad Man

Jeremy Rodock: You know, I ain't got you figured yet, McNulty. You act like a man with a lot of ideas. But all of them second rate... and not one honorable.


--James Cagney (as ) in Tribute to a Bad Man

Lon Chaney: [In character of Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre, to his estranged wife] What's the matter, Cleva? Still afraid of freaks?


--James Cagney (as ) in Man of a Thousand Faces

Lon Chaney: The kind of fellows I play, pretty girls don't write to.


--James Cagney (as ) in Man of a Thousand Faces

Martin Snyder: [Indignantly to Ruth] Now look here, you stupid liyyle broad, do you know who I am? Do you think I let dames talk to me that way?


--James Cagney (as ) in Love Me or Leave Me

Martin Snyder: [to reporters about Ruth] The girl can sing... About that I was never wrong.


--James Cagney (as ) in Love Me or Leave Me

Martin Snyder: [to Ruth Etting when she visits him in jail] Tell 'em you seen me in the pokey and I looked great! Tell 'em I like it! Makes me feel like a kid again!


--James Cagney (as ) in Love Me or Leave Me