- Emmi Straube: When he made his decision, he couldn't have known everything. Especially not the way people like you do, who've returned from exile and feel that you have a right to pass judgement. Because you are blameless, you think you know best who is a sinner and who deserves forgiveness. But you have no idea how people lived here.
- Dr. Wilhelm Furtwängler: I have always tried to analyse myself carefully and closely. In staying here, I believed I walked a tightrope between exile and the gallows. You seem to be blaming me for not having allowed myself to be hanged...
- Dr. Wilhelm Furtwängler: What kind of a world do you want, Major? What kind of world are you going to make? Do you honestly believe that the only reality is the material world, so you will be left nothing, nothing but feculence... more foul-smelling than that which pervades your nights... How was I to understand, how was I to know what they were capable of? No one knew. No one knew... .
- Major Steve Arnold: We handed Wilhelm Furtwängler over to the civil authorities and he was charged with serving the Nazi regime, with uttering anti-Semitic slurs, performing at an official Nazi Party function and with being a Prussian Privy Councillor. Dr. Furtwängler was acquitted. I didn't nail him. But I sure winged him. And I know I did the right thing... . Furtwängler resumed his career but he was never allowed to conduct in the United States. He died in 1954.
- Colonel Dymshitz: Let Furtwängler go. Please.
- Major Steve Arnold: I have a duty.
- Colonel Dymshitz: Duty? I am sorry, duty? Duty f***ing duty. Trouble is, you Americans want everybody to live like you. We liberated Berlin, Major Steve, not you. Our duty also is to bring back the best of German culture.
- Major Steve Arnold: I'm gonna get that f***ing bandleader, Colonel. No deal. No f***ing deal.