The Most Memorable Nick Fury Quotes In The MCU
Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) has played many parts during his tenure in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but he's best known as the director of SHIELD. These days, he's more of a freelancer, but his time in a position of leadership had him spreading frequent words of encouragement. Sure, he isn't every Avenger's favorite guy, nor is he trusted by all of them, but Fury certainly knows how to motivate a crowd, whether they want to hear it or not.
Even when he isn't officially leading them, Fury remains something of an authority figure to Earth's Mightiest Heroes, and the Avengers largely respect his no-nonsense approach. However, his speech is always a little more sarcastic and threatening when dealing with villains. No matter who he's speaking to or what position he might be in at the time, Fury is constantly delivering memorable quotes. He might not have as much screen time as some of the main Avengers, but with 11 film appearances in the MCU, he certainly racked up his fair share of one-liners. Scroll through our list and see if your favorite Nick Fury quote landed amongst his best.
'But if you want to stay ahead of me, Mr. Secretary, you need to keep both eyes open'
In "Captain America: The Winter Soldier," Nick Fury is betrayed by Secretary Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford) as he finds out that HYDRA, with Pierce at its head, has been infiltrating SHIELD for quite some time. An assassination order is put on Fury's head, with the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan) tasked with the responsibility. The attempt on his life is almost successful, with many fooled into thinking he had died, but Fury manages to hide himself during his recovery before coming back in full force.
When he and Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johnasson) storm SHIELD/HYDRA headquarters, they find themselves face to face with Pierce, who is rather surprised to see Fury. The former director's clearance has been wiped from SHIELD's computer system, but we find out he secretly entered another profile attached to the retinal scan of his damaged eye. "I know you erased my password, probably deleted my retinal scan," he says to Pierce. "But if you want to stay ahead of me, Mr. Secretary, you need to keep both eyes open." This is the first time we get a look at what's under that eye patch — a creative way for it to be unveiled to the audience.
'Sir, I'm gonna have to ask you to exit the donut'
"Iron Man 2" might not be on anybody's list of best MCU movies — or movies in general, for that matter — but it does manage to squeak out a few memorable one-liners. Nick Fury plays a small part in the film, but his appearance is memorable. After Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and James Rhodes (Don Cheadle) go toe-to-toe in Iron Man gear, the former takes off to escape the chaos he created at his mansion.
The day after the brawl (and the party of a lifetime), Tony ends up at Randy's Donuts and sits inside the iconic pastry display outside the bakery. As he's enjoying a tasty treat, Fury shows up and mockingly says, "Sir, I'm gonna have to ask you to exit the donut." He walks off contemptuously, and the two sit down inside the restaurant for an unfriendly conversation. Incidentally, this is also the scene where we get one of the most memorable Iron Man quotes, as he tells Fury "I told you I don't want to join your super-secret boy band."
'B**** please, you've been to space'
Nick Fury is featured prominently in "Spider-Man: Far From Home" as he recruits Peter Parker (Tom Holland) to come to Prague to battle the Fire Elemental (granted, the Fire Elemental isn't real, and it all turns out to be a ploy by Jake Gyllenhaal's Mysterio to become the world's newest hero, but Fury is being duped here, as well). When Peter meets with Mysterio, Fury, and Agent Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders), he seems taken aback by the proposition of helping out. "Mr. Fury, this all seems like big time, you know, huge superhero kind of stuff," he says. "I'm just your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, sir."
In one of the most Samuel L. Jackson moments of the MCU, Fury quips back, "B**** please, you've been to space!" Peter is very much being a very scared little boy here, so Fury feels the need to put him in check. Just one movie prior, Peter was fighting Thanos (Josh Brolin) on Titan, but going to Prague is apparently where he draws the line.
'Last time I trusted someone, I lost an eye'
No one can trust anyone in "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" with Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) having to watch his back at every turn. The untrustworthiness kicks off when Steve spots Natasha Romanoff stealing files on a captured SHIELD ship whose crew they were supposed be rescuing. When Steve approaches Nick Fury about this later at headquarters, he lets the boss know he can't lead a team if its members are running their own secret missions. "Soldiers trust each other. That's what makes it an army. Not a bunch of guys running around shooting guns," Steve tells Fury, who responds, "The last time I trusted someone, I lost an eye."
Of course, Fury is lying again ... sort of. We find out in "Captain Marvel" that he actually lost his eye thanks to an alien called a Flerken, and it wasn't exactly a horrific act of betrayal — Fury was holding the cat-shaped creature in front of his face and talking to it in loving tones, ignoring its disgruntled cat noises, until it finally scratched him, leading to another memorable Fury line: "Mother Flerken!"
'You never know. You hope for the best and make do with what you get'
Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) has an internal battle in "Avengers: Age of Ultron." He has a hard time processing the harm he inflicts when he's, as Tony Stark puts it, "an enormous green rage monster," and he doesn't trust himself in a romantic relationship with Natasha Romanoff. After the Avengers save the world (from a threat he and Stark created), Banner, in the form of the Hulk, flies away in a Quinjet bound for parts unknown, despite Natasha pleading with him to turn it around, or at least turn off the plane's stealth mode. Back at the Avengers Compound, Nick Fury suggests Banner just went off to Fiji and will send a postcard, but he gets Natasha thinking about her beginnings with the Avengers, and whether or not her mentor had any idea that she and Bruce would fall for one another.
"You sent me to recruit him way back when," Natasha says about meeting Bruce in the first "Avengers" film. "Did you know then what was gonna happen?"
"You never know," Fury says. "You hope for the best, then make do with what you get."
'You kiss your mother with that mouth?'
A phenomenal Captain America quote occurs in the first act of "Avengers: Age of Ultron," after Tony Stark flies into a force field and yells, "S***!" Being the gentlemen he is, Steve Rogers admonishes him, "Language!" and that one word becomes the butt of a running joke throughout the movie. When Stark says "ass" at the Avengers Tower party, for example, Maria Hill tells Steve that Tony said a "bad language word." Nick Fury gets the last laugh on the matter in the third act when he comes to save the people of Sokovia who weren't able to escape before it rose into the sky.
"Fury, you son of a b****," Steve says happily as the helicarrier arrives.
"Oooh, you kiss your mother with that mouth?" Fury replies. The former SHIELD director's comment suggests that the team continued to joke about "language" off-camera, because Fury wasn't present for any of the prior conversations — though of course, he does have ears everywhere.
'Well let me know if real power wants a magazine or something'
Nick Fury and Loki (Tom Hiddleston) have only had two conversations to date, both of which take place during "The Avengers." The second of these takes place after the trickster god is captured and locked up aboard Fury's helicarrier. After Fury tells Loki exactly how desperate Loki has made him, Loki starts talking about his favorite thing in the world — power.
"It burns you to come so close," Loki jeers. "To have the Tesseract, to have power. Unlimited power. And for what? A warm light for all mankind to share? And then to be reminded what real power is."
Fury, completely unphased, just walks away, quipping, "Well, let me know if 'real power' wants a magazine or something." How unbothered Fury is when he says that line is something we all should aspire to when talking with an enemy.
'Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on'
"The Avengers" opens with Nick Fury arriving at a clandestine science facility in the Mojave Desert where SHIELD and NASA have been studying the Tesseract. The mysterious and unpredictable artifact has recently started surging with unknown energy of its own accord, and Fury talks with Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) and Maria Hill about evacuating the building. Coulson says everyone inside should be out within a half-hour (to which Fury simply says "Do better,") but Maria Hill doesn't entirely see the point.
"Sir, evacuation may be futile," she says as she follows Fury up some windy steps. He replies sarcastically, asking if they should tell everyone in the compound to go back to sleep. Maria notes that "there may not be a minimum safe distance," but Fury disregards her concerns. He tells her to secure the prototypes known only as "Phase 2" and ensure they make it out of the facility, but Hill combats his decision again. "Sir, is that really a priority right now?" she asks.
"Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on," Fury responds. "Clear out the tech below. Every piece of Phase 2 on a truck and gone." And just like that, Hill gives him a "Yes, sir," and is on her way. Don't question Nick Fury.
'How desperate am I?'
Another of Nick Fury's most memorable lines comes in his aforementioned scene with a locked-up Loki. It's a terribly well-written back-and-forth and one of the best conversations of the entire movie. The two are talking about the Hulk, since the glass cage in which Loki is imprisoned was designed for Banner. "How desperate are you that you call upon such lost creatures to defend you?" Loki asks Fury.
Fury responds with one of the great speeches in the MCU: "How desperate am I? You threaten my world with war. You steal a force you can't hope to control. You talk about peace, and you kill 'cause it's fun. You have made me very desperate. You might not be glad that you did." Fury has captured the essence of Loki in just a few words, and he closes things out by brazenly threatening a being a million times stronger than him. No one scares Fury, and no one see him back down.
'I recognize the Council has made a decision, but given that it's a stupid-ass decision, I have elected to ignore it'
Just as with the "b****, please" quote from "Spider-Man: Far From Home," a little Samuel L. Jackson slips out during a very tense moment in "The Avengers." When things are completely out of control in New York City due to the Chitauri invasion, the World Security Council delivers some horrible news to Fury, who is still aboard the helicarrier. "Director Fury, the Council has made a decision," they note, referring to their plan to launch a nuclear warhead at Manhattan. "I recognize the Council has made a decision," Fury responds, "but given that it's a stupid-ass decision, I have elected to ignore it."
Since Fury is closest to the action in New York and has nukes on board the helicarrier, the Council wants him to give the order. "That is the island of Manhattan, Councilman," Fury snaps back. "Until I'm certain my team can't hold it, I will not order a nuclear strike against a civilian population." Unfortunately, a pilot takes off without Fury's order anyway, and Tony Stark is left to prevent it from blowing up the city.
'Excuse me, did we come to your planet and blow stuff up?'
Toward the middle of "The Avengers," all the superheroes (sans a mind-controlled Hawkeye) come together with Nick Fury in Bruce Banner's lab on the helicarrier, just before they're ambushed by Loki's forces. The team is brand new and not fully a team yet, so tensions arise rather quickly as they confront each other's flaws — and learn that SHIELD had been attempting to weaponize the power of the Tesseract since Thor (Chris Hemsworth) battled the Asgardian automaton known as the Destroyer through the streets of the small town of Puente Antiguo, New Mexico. In the ensuing argument, Tony Stark and Steve Rogers start bickering, unable to see eye-to-eye, and Thor is surprised to see how the people of Earth behave. "I thought humans were more evolved than this," the God of Thunder says to the team.
Without hesitation, Fury turns around, looks at Thor, and asks, "Excuse me, did we come to your planet and blow stuff up?" The Asgardians, it turns out, aren't as evolved as their prince would like to believe they are. Thor writes the check, and Fury sure as hell cashes it.
'Is the sun coming up?'
Nick Fury doesn't deal with stupidity well, especially when someone's incompetence affects the lives of hundreds. In "The Avengers," the team is ambushed by Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and some of Loki's other puppeted combatants, and the helicarrer starts to fall out of the air as one of its turbines is destroyed. Fury runs into mission control and begins barking orders, telling a helmsman to head south and get the ship over water. "We're flying blind," the pilot replies. "Navigation's recalibrating after the engine failure."
"Is the sun coming up?" a frustrated and annoyed Fury demands. When the pilot meekly admits that it is, Fury quips in exasperation, "Then put it on the left!" Fury clearly has no use for a helmsman who can't even find one of the cardinal directions without the ship's navigation system helping him. That poor guy must have ditched compass day in Boy Scouts.
'The idea was to bring together a group of remarkable people'
Perhaps Nick Fury's most famous quote — and one of the most memorable in the entire MCU — comes just after Phil Coulson's death in "The Avengers." Tony Stark and Steve Rogers are sitting at a table on the helicarrier as Fury gives them his version of a pep talk, sorely needed now that Loki has escaped and all hope is lost. He admits that he and SHIELD were planning on building weapons with the Tesseract, but says that he never put all his eggs in that basket because he was banking on an even bigger risk.
"There was an idea — Stark knows this — called the Avengers Initiative," Fury says. "The idea was to bring together a group of remarkable people, to see if they could become something more. To see if they could work together when we needed them to, to fight the battles that we never could." This speech was cemented further into MCU fans' minds thanks to one of the "Avengers: Infinity War" trailers, which dropped in 2018. The trailer kicks off with Fury's speech, broken down into parts and spoken first by Fury himself, then by Tony, Vision (Paul Bettany), Thor, and Natasha Romanoff, foreshadowing the imminent arrival of the Avengers' greatest defeat.
'I'm here to talk to you about the Avenger Initiative'
While the MCU as it exists today would have been a laughable concept in 2008, we found out that the Avengers were part of Marvel Studios' plans almost immediately, thanks to the end credits of the first MCU movie, "Iron Man." After the film has concluded with Tony Stark revealing his superhero identity to the world, the first MCU post-credits scene sees Stark return home to his mansion, where he finds Nick Fury waiting for him. "'I am Iron Man,'" Fury begins, throwing Stark's own words back at him. "You think you're the only superhero in the world? Mr. Stark, you've become part of a bigger universe. You just don't know it yet."
When Tony asks "Who the hell are you," Fury introduces himself as the Director of SHIELD, an organization Agent Coulson had briefly mentioned earlier in the movie. The last line before the screen cuts to black is "I'm here to talk to you about the Avenger Initiative."
None of us could have imagined how big this world was going to get after that line was spoken, or how "the Avengers" was about to become one of the biggest names in all of cinema. Fury's simple line changed everything, and re-watching that post-credits scene fills you with nostalgia in the best possible way.