Famous movie lines have a way of insinuating themselves into popular culture and language, until even those who know a film only by hearsay quote from it, if only because everyone else does.

Japanese films have generated their share of 名せりふ (meiserifu or famous lines), though it helps to know the context to get the full effect. For example,「事件は会議室で起きてるんじゃない！現場で起きてるんだ！」("Jiken wa kaigishitsu de okiterunjanai! Genba de okiterunda!" "Crimes don't occur in the conference room! They occur in the streets!") has become a movie quote that "everyone knows." However, its power comes from the character who utters it, Yuji Oda's Detective Aoshima in「踊る大捜査線」("Odoru Daisosasen [Bayside Shakedown]"), a 1998 film based on a hit TV show about cops in the trendy Tokyo Bay district. A cheeky nonconformist, Aoshima keeps butting heads with his 上司 (joshi, superiors) in the 警察官僚 (keisatsu kanryō, police bureaucracy). The above line, shouted at the film's climax, became the era's cri de coeur.

Enduring even longer as a kernel of movie wisdom is「人を憎んでる暇はない。わしにはそんな暇はない」("Hito wo nikunderu hima wa nai. Washi niwa sonna hima wa nai," "I don't have time to hate anyone. I don't have that kind of time") from Akira Kurosawa's「生きる」("Ikiru," 1952). Takashi Shimura's petty bureaucrat hero says this line as he desperately tries to get approval from his colleagues to build a neighborhood park before cancer claims his life, though even the non-terminally ill have since taken it to heart.