Best Jaws (1975) movie quotes

By Alex Wiggan

In 1975, director Steven Spielberg’s tense horror-thriller, Jaws, splashed down in cinemas. The movie – about a Great White shark, which terrorises the picturesque tourist destination of Amity Island – proved to be a huge hit with audiences, and remains a beloved classic to this day.

Over the years, audiences have returned to Jaws for its great characters, its superb soundtrack, and its nerve-shredding suspense. Audiences have also come back to Jaws for its fantastic dialogue, which has served up some killer lines from characters such as Brody, Hooper, and Quint!

In this post I am taking a look at the best quotes from Jaws, to highlight the standout lines. So, if you’ve been itching to sink your teeth into some fin-tastic dialogue, this post is for you!

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The best quotes from Jaws (1975)

Brody – “Smile, you son of a bitch!”

Quint – “Here lies the body of Mary Lee; died at the age of a hundred and three. For fifteen years she kept her virginity; not a bad record for this vicinity.”

Ellen Brody – “Martin hates boats. Martin hates water. Martin… Martin sits in his car when we go on the ferry to the mainland. I guess it’s a childhood thing. It’s a… there’s a clinical name for it isn’t there?”

Brody – “Drowning.”

Brody – “What day is this?”

Hooper – “It’s Wednesday… eh, it’s Tuesday, I think.”

Brody – “Think the tide’s with us?”

Hooper – “Keep kicking.”

Brody – “I used to hate the water…”

Hooper – “I can’t imagine why.”

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Quint – “Here’s to swimmin’ with bow-legged women.”

Brody – “That’s some bad hat, Harry.”

Quint – “Y’all know me. Know how I earn a livin’. I’ll catch this bird for you, but it ain’t gonna be easy. Bad fish. Not like going down the pond chasin’ bluegills and tommycods. This shark, swallow you whole. Little shakin’, little tenderizin’, an’ down you go. And we gotta do it quick, that’ll bring back your tourists, put all your businesses on a payin’ basis. But it’s not gonna be pleasant. I value my neck a lot more than three thousand bucks, chief. I’ll find him for three, but I’ll catch him, and kill him, for ten. But you’ve gotta make up your minds. If you want to stay alive, then ante up. If you want to play it cheap, be on welfare the whole winter. I don’t want no volunteers, I don’t want no mates, there’s just too many captains on this island. $10,000 for me by myself. For that you get the head, the tail, the whole damn thing.”

Hooper – “I’m not going to waste my time arguing with a man who’s lining up to be a hot lunch.”

Brody – “Take this stuff back to the office and get to work on those signs. “Beaches Closed – No Swimming. By the Order of the Amity PD”. And let Polly do the printing.”

Hendricks – “What’s the matter with my printing?”

Brody – “Let Polly do the printing.”

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Brody – “You’re certifiable, Quint! You know that?”

Quint – “Yeah, yeah, yeah…”

Mrs. Kintner – “Chief Brody?”

Brody – “Yes?”

Mrs. Kintner – “I just found out, that a girl got killed here last week, and you knew it! You knew there was a shark out there! You knew it was dangerous! But you let people go swimming anyway? You knew all those things! But still my boy is dead now. And there’s nothing you can do about it. My boy is dead. I wanted you to know that.”

Mayor Vaughn – “I’m sorry, Martin. She’s wrong.”

Brody – “No, she’s not.”

Mayor Vaughn – “I’m only trying to say that Amity is a summer town. We need summer dollars. Now, if the people can’t swim here, they’ll be glad to swim at the beaches of Cape Cod, the Hamptons, Long Island…”

Brody – “That doesn’t mean we have to serve them up as smorgasbord!”

Hooper – “Boys, oh boys… I think he’s come back for his noon feeding.”

Hooper – “Didn’t you get on a boat and check out these waters?”

Brody – “No.”

Hooper – “Well, this is not a boat accident! It wasn’t any propeller, it wasn’t any coral reef, and it wasn’t Jack the Ripper!”

Hooper – “It was a shark.”

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Brody – “Larry, the summer is over. You’re the mayor of “shark city”. These people think you want the beaches open.”

Quint – (Seeing Hooper sat on the deck playing solitaire) “Stop playin’ with yourself, Hooper.”

Brody – “It doesn’t make any sense when you pay a guy like you to watch sharks.”

Hooper – “Well, uh, it doesn’t make much sense for a guy who hates the water to live on an island either.”

Brody – “It’s only an island if you look at it from the water.”

Hooper – “That makes a lot of sense.”

Ellen Brody – (Upon meeting Matt Hooper) “My husband tells me you’re in sharks.”

Hooper – “Ha, ha – they’re all gonna die.”

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Quint – “Y’know, by the end of that first dawn… lost a hundred men. I dunno how many sharks. Maybe a thousand. I dunno how many men, they averaged six an hour. On Thursday mornin’, Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland – baseball player, boatswain’s mate. I thought he was asleep, reached over to wake him up… bobbed up and down in the water just like a kinda top. Upended. Well, he’d been bitten in half below the waist. Noon the fifth day, Mr. Hooper, a Lockheed Ventura saw us, he swung in low and he saw us. Young pilot, a lot younger than Mr. Hooper. Anyway, he saw us and come in low and three hours later, a big fat PBY comes down and start to pick us up. Y’know, that was the time I was most frightened, waitin’ for my turn. I’ll never put on a life jacket again. So, eleven hundred men went into the water, three hundred sixteen men come out, and the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945.”

Mayor Vaughn – “And what did you say the name of this shark is?”

Hooper – “It’s a carcaradon carcharias. It’s a Great White.”

Mayor Vaughn – “Martin, it’s all psychological. You yell barracuda, everybody says, “Huh? What?” You yell shark, we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July.”

Ellen Brody – “You told me the shark was caught. And I, I heard it on the news… I heard it on the Cape station.”

Hooper – “They caught A shark, not THE shark. Big difference. Not the shark that killed Chrissie Watkins, and probably not the shark that killed the little boy; which I wanted to prove today, by cutting the shark open.”

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Brody – “On the water?”

Hooper – “Well, if we’re looking for a shark, we’re not gonna find him on the land.”

Mayor Vaughn – “I’m pleased and happy to repeat the news that we have, in fact, caught and killed a large predator that supposedly injured some bathers. But, as you see, it’s a beautiful day, the beaches are open and people are having a wonderful time. Amity, as you know, means “friendship”.”

Mayor Vaughn – “I don’t think either of one you are familiar with our problems.”

Hooper – “I think that I am familiar with the fact that you are going to ignore this particular problem until it swims up and bites you on the ass!”

Hooper – “Mr. Vaughn, what we are dealing with here is a perfect engine, an eating machine. It’s really a miracle of evolution. All this machine does is swim and eat and make little sharks, and that’s all.”

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