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Frequently voted the scariest movie of all time, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining may not be full of snappy one-liners but it does boast Jack Nicholson's famous ad-libbed utterance "Here's Johnny!". Out of context it seems harmless, but when coupled with the iconic imagery of a deranged Nicholson axing his way through a wooden door en-route to his petrified wife, it's enough to make even the most unflinching movie fan cower into the couch.
Not only does this classic quote summarise the plot of the entire film, it's also a snapshot of Monty Python's brilliantly absurd humour, distinguished by this acute sense of the ridiculous, satirical and camp, and at times as wilfully blasphemous as anything in the history of cinema. The film stirred its fair share of controversy at the time, initially banned in Ireland and Norway. Just as well they didn't stick with Eric Idle's original title - Jesus Christ: Lust For Glory.
A true cult classic (particularly for students who aspire to the record-breaking feats of liver abuse on display), Withnail & I is brimming with absurdly quotable passages - none more so than the scene in which our legless anti-heroes stumble into an old ladies' tearoom and pompously demand "the finest wines available to humanity". Despite his effortlessly convincing performance as a drunkard, actor Richard E Grant is in fact teetotal - although director Bruce Dickinson eventually persuaded him to down a tumbler of vodka in rehearsals to add authenticity to his rendition. Whether he was drunk when agreeing to do those Argos commercials, though, we'll never know...
Re-used by just about everybody in middle management during their staff training sessions eg. "the first rule of Croydon Office Supplies is...", this is the moment that Brad Pitt's fearsomely imposing Tyler Durden introduces the rules of Fight Club to his assembled rabble of white collar disciples. So replete with such streetwise, MTV-friendly sound bites was Chuck Palahniuk's original novel, in fact, that the leap onto celluloid transformed it instantly into a cultural phenomenon, still remembered for other gems such as "This is your life - and it's ending one minute at a time".
Samuel L Jackson's smart-talking, bible-quoting Jules is the quintessential Tarantino gangster, firing out one-liners like a hail of bullets in his most memorable screen role to date. This razor-sharp way with words has seen Tarantino amass a library's worth of über-quotable dialogue, key to his rise from cult director to cultural icon. Most importantly, though, he was responsible for the introduction of the word "gimp" to thousands of sniggering students across the country.