The actor:	Jesse Eisenberg
The character:	Mark Zuckerberg
The film:	The Social Network
The line:	“If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook.”

When I started working on this list, my guess was that The Social Network would lead the league in quotes. It’s really a great screenplay, from structure to characterization, and of course it’s as quippy as the nights are long. Naturally, this is the only line from The Social Network I’ve got, and the reason why is actually pretty mundane. A lot of the best lines in this movie are back-and-forths, call-and-response. For example, that line that I’ve been remembering as “You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.” is actually more like a conversation. “You know what’s cool?” Sean asks. Beat. Eduardo, who has been over this meeting before it started, says, “You?” Beat. “A billion dollars.” I’m trying to leave conversations out of this, and so that line which I thought of as a shoo-in to make the top ten is nowhere to be found.

The Social Network has an incredibly smug little way of sounding, which is the only way Aaron Sorkin knows how to sound, but you know what, it sounds incredibly appropriate coming from the lips of all these godawful rich people. This is how the generationally wealthy sound, of course, in tone if not in precise words. Enough people have had some kind of grudging fear of the generationally wealthy from the time they started socializing that they don’t hear “What a stupid thing to say” as often as the rest of us do. This is a self-lubricating machine. The less they hear it, the more sure they are that what they say must be spectacular. Elon Musk.

Sometimes that smug speech is punctured by moments of real pathos, and when that happens it’s almost entirely because of Andrew Garfield. Garfield has been way older than you think he is for a long time now, but he still has that ability to seem like a guy who’s barely left those teenage years in 2010. His voice cracks a little bit for a number of those pathetic moments, either the hysterical (“THE MARLINS! AND THE TROUT!”) or the barefaced (“Tell me this isn’t about getting into the Phoenix.”) The best of this movie, on purpose and in practice, is in Eduardo, who retains his conscience way longer than anyone else manages to.

This is a long way round to saying that the best single line in this film is this one, which I think is where Mark Zuckerberg (the movie version, not necessarily the real guy, calm down, Zuck, go slaughter your own meat again or something) comes through most. For Mark, things really are that simple. Part of what drives that is just the raw intelligence, the ability to see code as possibility, the way that he can break down data faster than anyone else. A lot more of that is that he thinks he’s right all the time. He’s right a lot! For example, a Facebook that Eduardo Saverin of the film managed to monetize within its first year or two might have collapsed for its ordinariness; Zuckerberg of the film recognizes that the delicate commodity Facebook can trade in is being cool, and holds out for another noted asshole in Peter Thiel. What that means is that for all the difficulty of launching Facebook, of the tsuris and twisting that goes into creating the company and making it popular, Mark looks at Facebook and sees the elementary. If someone else had invented Facebook…they’d have invented Facebook. Easy.