In a famous scene, looking down upon the people beneath from his vantage point on top of the Riesenrad, the large Ferris wheel in the Prater amusement park, Lime compares them to dots. Back on the ground, he makes the now famous remark:
"In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed — they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
Greene has conceded that this remark was not his own invention, but rather Welles' contribution to the script. Welles himself admitted that he was inspired to his speech by a much smaller and older quote that implied the same from a Hungarian play. The cuckoo clock is in fact a German invention, not Swiss.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Man
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