Thursday, November 14, 2024 Text is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

Tom Stoppard


British dramatist and screenwriter.
Tom Stoppard
It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing.
Stoppard quotes
Bennett seems to be showing alarming signs of irony. I have always found that irony among the lower orders is the first sign of an awakening social consciousness. It remains to be seen whether it will grow into an armed seizure of the means of production, distribution and exchange, or spend itself in liberal journalism.
Stoppard
Wagner: There were printers getting more than journalists!
Milne: Yes, I know, but you make it sound as if the natural order has been overthrown. Fish sing in the streets, rivers run uphill, and the printers are getting more than the journalists. Okay — you're worth more than a printer. But look at some of this — "We find the vanishing vicar of Lovers' Leap!" "Sally Smith is a tea lady in a Blackpool engineering works, but it was the way she filled those C-cups which got our cameraman all stirred up!" It's crap. And it's written by grown men earning maybe ten thousand a year. If I was a printer, I'd look at some of the stuff I'm given to print, and I'd ask myself what is supposed to be so special about the people who write it — is that radical enough for you — Dick?




Stoppard Tom quotes
Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.
Stoppard Tom
How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field... Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight.
Tom Stoppard quotes
From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.
Tom Stoppard
It was precisely this notion of infinite series which in the sixth century BC led the Greek philosopher Zeno to conclude that since an arrow shot towards a target first had to cover half the distance, and then half the remainder, and then half the remainder after that, and so on ad infinitum, the result was, as I will now demonstrate, that though an arrow is always approaching its target, it never quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian died of fright.
Stoppard Tom quotes
We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?
Stoppard
Dotty: Archie says the Church is a monument to irrationality.
George: ... The National Gallery is a monument to irrationality! Every concert hall is a monument to irrationality! — and so is a nicely kept garden, or a lover's favour, or a home for stray dogs! You stupid woman, if rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!
Stoppard Tom
Bakunin: Left to themselves people are noble, generous, uncorrupted, they'd create a completely new kind of society if only people weren't so blind, stupid and selfish.
Herzen: Is that the same people or different people?
Bakunin: The same people.
Tom Stoppard
Herzen: Marx is a bourgeois from the anus up.
Natalie : Alexander! I won't have that word...
Herzen: Sorry, middle-class.




Tom Stoppard quotes
Language is a finite instrument crudely applied to an infinity of ideas, and one consequence of the failure to take account of this is that modern philosophy has made itself ridiculous by analysing such statements as, "This is a good bacon sandwich," or, "Bedser had a good wicket."
Tom Stoppard
It is a defect of God's humour that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.
Stoppard quotes
I will take his secret to the grave, telling people along the way. Betrayal is no sin if it is whimsical.
Stoppard Tom
To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.
Stoppard Tom quotes
It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.
Tom Stoppard
An essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.
Tom Stoppard quotes
Public postures have the configuration of private derangement.
Tom Stoppard
I never got used to the way the house Trots fell into the jargon back in Grimsby — I mean, on any other subject, like the death of the novel, or the sex life of the editor's secretary, they spoke ordinary English, but as soon as they started trying to get me to join the strike it was as if their brains had been taken out and replaced by one of those little golf-ball things you get in electric typewriters... "Betrayal"... "Confrontation"... "Management"... My God, you'd need a more supple language than that to describe an argument between two amoebas.
Stoppard Tom
I'd push the lot of you over a cliff myself. Except the one in the wheelchair, I think I'd lose the sympathy vote before people had time to think it through.


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