10 Best ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ Quotes, Ranked

The Wolf of Wall Street is one of those movies that ends up being a bit of everything, spreading itself generously over multiple genres and having an epic runtime that reaches three hours in total. It’s a biographical movie of sorts, centered on Jordan Belfort and based on his memoir of the same name, and it details how he used fraudulent means to become remarkably wealthy through activities on Wall Street in the 1980s and 1990s.

It was a film that once again saw Martin Scorsese succeeding within the crime genre, with the style and pacing here feeling somewhat reminiscent of Goodfellas, but things like tone, narrative, and setting proving less familiar. And The Wolf of Wall Street also had a capable cast firing on all cylinders, and relishing all the great lines of dialogue found in Terence Winter’s adapted screenplay. Some of those best individual lines are ranked below (with some censoring needed for the profane ones… and it’s a movie jam-packed with profanity, to say the least).

10 “I am not gonna die sober!”

Jordan Belfort

The Jordan Belfort of The Wolf of Wall Street might well be one of the best characters out of any Scorsese film or, if not, then he’s certainly up there as one of the most quotable. As such, he’s going to be featured much more heavily here than anyone else, but he is both the film’s central character and its narrator, ensuring very few moments throughout the movie lack his voice and/or presence in some way.

And much of Belfort’s lifestyle revolves around reckless drug use, so he talks about it quite a bit, even in the middle of a disaster at sea, on board a sinking yacht. He seems ready to perish, but not sober, with Leonardo DiCaprio’s typically intense acting really selling the moment as darkly funny (though after this, the whole misadventure does make Belfort rethink his drug use).

9 “Fugayzi, fugazi. It’s a whazy. It’s a woozie. It’s fairy dust. It doesn’t exist. It’s never landed. It is no matter. It’s not on the elemental chart. It’s not f**king real.”

Mark Hanna

As something of a rise-and-fall movie, The Wolf of Wall Street begins with Jordan Belfort relatively low-key, all things considered, and maybe even mild-mannered (at least by Wall Street standards). Things change when he’s employed at L.F. Rothschild early on, with his boss, Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey) encouraging a certain level of ruthlessness and selfishness within the world of stockbroking if Belfort ever wants to find immense success.

It’s startling just how much of The Wolf of Wall Street McConaughey manages to steal, even though he’s only in the movie for the first 15 or so minutes, and really just has one extended scene with DiCaprio. But it’s a highlight, and hearing McConaughey’s drawl as he lays out the “not f**king real” purported science behind stocks going up or down is a blast.

8 “You know what? I’m not leaving. I’m not f**king leaving!”

Jordan Belfort

Before The Wolf of Wall Street, Leonardo DiCaprio had been in his fair share of compelling Martin Scorsese movies, though he was sometimes upstaged by other actors (see Daniel Day-Lewis in Gangs of New York, and arguably Jack Nicholson in The Departed). He was central in solid films like The Aviator and Shutter Island, too, but there’s an argument to be made that his biggest and best performance in a Scorsese film can be found in The Wolf of Wall Street.

DiCaprio gets to live out a leading actor’s dream here, with some sequences in this film allowing him to go either on extended monologues (usually through voiceover) or give big speeches (given Belfort co-founds then runs Stratton Oakmont). He gives a supposed farewell speech at one point, owing to the need to lie low while various legal issues are sorted out, but he backs away from backing down mid-speech, energizing the other members of the firm by boldly declaring “I’m not leaving” repeatedly, and progressively louder each time.

7 “Who? What are you, a f**king owl? Who is she?”

Naomi Lapaglia

Owing to the world depicted in The Wolf of Wall Street, men are in the foreground – and get most of the dialogue – while female characters sometimes get relegated to the background. It speaks to the attitudes that the main characters tend to hold, though, and it’s hard to feel like the movie necessarily celebrates such views. Plus, Margot Robbie does make an impression with what’s easily the most significant female character in the film, Belfort’s wife, Naomi Lapaglia.

There’s catharsis found in this character, as she’s one of the few people who fights back against Jordan’s nonsense, and one of the few who has the capacity to hurt him emotionally. She memorably counters his rather lackluster attempts to shrug off an argument about infidelity, with Naomi likening his continued declarations of “Who? Who?” to sounding like “a f**king owl.” It’s a line said by Al Pacino in Heat, too, for what it’s worth.

6 “The real question is this: was all this legal? Absolutely f**king not.”

Jordan Belfort

Jordan Belfort seems perfectly willing to bring viewers into his world, at least at first, in The Wolf of Wall Street. The narration instantly feels like it’s addressing the audience, and DiCaprio sometimes talks into the camera, effectively breaking the fourth wall. It’s similar to the ending courtroom scene in Goodfellas, but such a method of delivering information/exposition starts being used much earlier on in The Wolf of Wall Street.

But Belfort somewhat humorously reaches a breaking point eventually, stopping during a complicated spiel about stockbroking and saying: “Look, I know you’re not following what I’m saying anyway.” He cuts to the chase with what’s become one of The Wolf of Wall Street’s most iconic lines, declaring: “The real question is this: was all this legal? Absolutely f**king not.” Even with the f-bomb for added punctuation, it still feels like a humorous understatement, given what the viewer’s already witnessed by this point in the movie.

5 “Let me tell you something. There’s no nobility in poverty. I have been a rich man and I have been a poor man. And I choose rich every f**king time.”

Jordan Belfort

Martin Scorsese’s body of work from the 2010s is defined by its variety and complexity, with the latter being found in the way that, just as in decades past, he’s explored moral issues with nuance. Indeed, The Wolf of Wall Street paints Belfort as a flawed person capable of doing terrible things, but the movie also makes sure you understand why he picked the life he did, in turn outlining why other people might aspire to be like him.

He pronounces, in a speech at one point, that there is “no nobility in poverty.” It’s easy to have a gut reaction (involving anger) at such a statement, but at the same time, the Western world is designed in a way that encourages ruthlessness and greed to some extent. Belfort’s worldview is shown here: he sees a cruel system, and he chooses to exploit rather than submit. He might not be doing the right thing, but as things currently stand (being heavily flawed and all), there’s an argument to be made that he was, to some extent, doing the smart thing.

4 “Just f**king smoke crack with me, bro.”

Donnie Azoff

The crime found in The Wolf of Wall Street isn’t just white-collar in nature, given how many laws are broken surrounding drug use and debaucherous actions. And Jonah Hill is a naturally good actor to have in your film if you want to make something about people behaving badly and/or swearing, because he’s great at playing people who are either up to no good, or look like they’re up to no good.

Hill plays the other founder of Stratton Oakmont, Donnie Azoff, who’s shown to be even more chaotic than Belfort right from his introduction. He quits his job on the spot for Belfort, admits to having married his first cousin, and might well like hard drugs even more than Belfort, at least early on. The way he basically begs “Just f**king smoke crack with me, bro” works well as a non-sequitur, but it’s also darkly funny in context, too.

3 “I f**ked her goddamn brains out… for eleven seconds.”

Jordan Belfort

So, The Wolf of Wall Street, as already outlined, is packed with profanity and drug use, making it automatically feel far from suitable for family movie night. But it gets worse (or better, depending on your outlook) when taking into account the film’s unapologetically full-on sexual content – by American film standards – which is in keeping with the way The Wolf of Wall Street overall unpacks and depicts debauchery.

Related to this, Jordan Belfort humorously outlines his first sexual experience with his soon-to-be wife Naomi Lapaglia as lasting for just 11 seconds. The self-deprecation from the usually arrogant Belfort kind of helps humanize him, and it’s a generally funny moment, made even better (or potentially worse, depending on your feelings toward cringe comedy) by the awkward post-coital dialogue Jordan and Naomi have.

2 “Gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers in this racket.”

Mark Hanna

Returning to that aforementioned legendarily well-acted Matthew McConaughey scene, part of it involves Mark Hanna talking to Jordan Belfort about – to borrow a Seinfeld phrase – being the master of one’s domain. Hanna admits to taking part in Contest-losing behavior on a surprisingly regular basis, and seems disappointed when Belfort talks about how often he masters his domain.

Hanna flat out says: “Gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers,” making for a highly adaptable line of dialogue that’s one of the best found/heard in The Wolf of Wall Street. The way the activity is discussed makes it sound like its own kind of drug, and it speaks to the hedonism and pursuit of selfish interests displayed by Belfort throughout the rest of the movie. So, on top of being really funny, it helps foreshadow certain themes found throughout the rest of the movie.

1 “On a daily basis, I consume enough drugs to sedate Manhattan, Long Island, and Queens for a month. I take Quaaludes 10 to 15 times a day for my ‘back pain,’ Adderall to stay focused, Xanax to take the edge off, pot to mellow me out, cocaine to wake me back up again, and morphine… Well, because it’s awesome.”

Jordan Belfort

The Wolf of Wall Street establishes itself as a great movie right from the get-go, largely thanks to that aforementioned personable narration courtesy of flawed protagonist Jordan Belfort. He runs through his lifestyle and outlook on the world in general early on, and this includes laying out, in exhaustive detail, just how much he likes drugs, and just how many of them he uses.

It’s a film that does tackle the topic of drug addiction well, as though it finds some humor in the behavior drug misuse causes (just look at most of the extended Quaaludes scene), it also shows the problems such activities can cause. Belfort states that he consumes “enough drugs to sedate Manhattan, Long Island, and Queens for a month,” and though that might sound like over-the-top bragging at first, to his credit, he does back up such a claim with the things viewers see him doing throughout the rest of the film.

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