The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world.


Tom Stoppard

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

Related

I claim to be a human rights man , and wherever there is a human being, I see God-given rights inher...
WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON
Wherever there is a human being, I see God-given rights inherent in that being, whatever may be the ...
WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON
Where there is a human being, I see God-given rights inherent in that being, whatever may be the se...
WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON
Wherever there is a human being, I see God-given rights inherent in that being, whatever may be the ...
WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON
Our political and constitutional rights, so called, are but the natural and inherent rights of man, ...
GERRIT SMITH
Human rights are women's rights, and women's rights are human rights.
HILLARY CLINTON
The rights of homosexual people are human rights, and human rights are for everyone.
RICKY MARTIN
I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of...
DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN
We do not agree that the human rights of the victims are more important than the human rights of the...
GRAHAM WATSON
These are the weapons being used for massive human rights violations in key trouble spots around the...
BRIAN WOOD
Fundamental rights or the human rights are not about having it in the constitution. It is about prac...
DEVASKI
Gay rights are human rights.
HILLARY CLINTON
We do not agree ... that the human rights of the victims are more important than the human rights of...
GRAHAM WATSON
The Human Rights Organisation deceives the world by calling itself a human rights council.
YAIR LAPID
There are certainly human rights concerns. Very serious human rights concerns that I would like to h...
MARY ROBINSON
The idea of legally establishing inalienable, inherent and sacred rights of the individual is not of...
GEORGE JELLINEK
We do acknowledge that we have deficiencies in the area of human rights, but at the same time we wou...
ZHU RONGJI
Property rights are not the rights of property; they are the rights of humans with regard to propert...
DAVID FRIEDMAN
A freedom of expression that destroys world peace is against basic human rights.
LIAQAT BALUCH
Creating false distinctions between human rights and property rights plays into the hands of Democra...
WALTER WILLIAMS
Whenever there is a conflict between human rights and property rights, human rights must prevail
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
The focus should be more on those who are violating human rights and denying people their human righ...
SCOTT MCCLELLAN
Let us remember that every person who is infected, whatever the reason, is a fellow human being with...
KOFI ANNAN
Human rights are a list of rights written by people who think we are wrong by default.
MICHAEL BOAG
Human rights are not a privilege granted by the few, they are a liberty entitled to all, and human r...
KAY GRANGER
To work to change practices, to change some of the policies, so that people's basic human rights and...
JENNIFER ALLEN
Nothing is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
Economic, social and cultural rights are often overlooked when we are seeing rights through a politi...
JOSEPH SCHECHLA
Two presidents pursued human rights policies that were serious and effective: Reagan and George W. B...
ELLIOTT ABRAMS
Being a humanitarian, supporting animal rights activists, human rights activists, it's all the s...
DARYL HANNAH
Human rights are not a popularity contest. Letting this march proceed is an international obligation...
SCOTT LONG
Nothing then is unchangeable but the inherent and inalienable rights of man
THOMAS JEFFERSON
Our recent history should have made one thing clear. Women's rights are human rights. Any foreign po...
JACK HOLLAND
The best education system is based on quality and equality. Children who are allowed to fall behind ...
EVARIST BARTOLO
Many of these activists are defending human rights. The authorities must ensure that they are able t...
MARK ALLISON
Those religions that are oppressive to women are also against democracy, human rights, and freedom o...
TASLIMA NASRIN
Rights that do not flow from duty well performed are not worth having.
MAHATMA GANDHI
Human rights are indivisible. Freedom and security are not alternatives, they go hand-in-hand ... Mu...
GRAHAM WATSON
Relativism should be confronted where it damages fundamental human rights, because we're not rel...
ROCCO BUTTIGLIONE
My position as regards the monied interests can be put in a few words. In every civilized society pr...
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
We are all human beings and I believe that we all should have equal rights.
BLAKE MYCOSKIE
Human rights and gender awareness are built into the program.
BRENDA BELL
I believe demonstrations have been planned by human rights groups who are far more annoyed at the hu...
SAMINA AHMED
There are justified reasons for believing that democratic rule is a necessary condition for enjoying...
DUOP CHAK WUOL
The idea of cultural relativism is nothing but an excuse to violate human rights.
SHIRIN EBADI
We are talking about human rights, ... The first human right is to remain alive, and Israel is in da...
SHIMON PERES
If there is justice with no mercy, Ira Flatow will have to come back countless times as a lab rat fo...
ANIMAL RIGHTS
If a country doesn't recognize minority rights and human rights, including women's rights, y...
HILLARY CLINTON
The presumption of innocence, the benefit of the doubt, walking without worrying - these should not ...
RANDI WEINGARTEN
One of the embarrassments of being a gentleman is that you are not permitted to be violent in assert...
NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER
Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a ...
TOM STOPPARD
Rights! There are no rights whatever without corresponding duties. Look at the history of the growth...
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
Life is a perspective and for me, if a human being has access to school, clean water, food, proper h...
GELILA BEKELE
Safeguarding the rights of others is the most noble and beautiful end of a human being.
KHALIL GIBRAN
Safeguarding the rights of others is the most noble and beautiful end of a human being.
KAHLIL GIBRAN
America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense, it is the other way around. Human rights ...
JIMMY CARTER
The definition of security must be broadened to encompass the security of people, as well as states....
IRENE KHAN
America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense... human rights invented America.
JIMMY CARTER
America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense human rights invented America.
JIMMY CARTER
When the U.S. and other Western powers commit such a gross violation of human rights, it further wea...
AFRASIAB KHATTAK
The idea that 'the public interest' supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning...
AYN RAND
The free world led by the U.S. fought almost all regimes that trampled on human rights.
LIU XIAOBO
Liberty, freedom and democracy are very fuzzy words, but human rights is very specific.
JOICHI ITO
We spoke about the importance of raising international consciousness on the issue of human rights in...
JAY LEFKOWITZ
We truly convinced that the respect and protection of human rights and freedoms are the main pillars...
FATOS NANO
In a world of increasing inequality, the legitimacy of institutions that give precedence to the prop...
DAVID KORTEN
It's not just immigrant rights that are at stake anymore, it's all citizens' rights that are at stak...
ALI NOORANI
I refer to calls for humanitarian intervention in the affairs of another state - a new idea, this - ...
BORIS YELTSIN
Civil Rights: What black folks are given in the U.S. on the installment plan, as in civil-rights bil...
DICK GREGORY
In the name of the rule of law, democracy and human rights, we cannot accept that the rights of indi...
TARIQ RAMADAN
The reports that are coming out, particularly by Human Rights Watch, merit our very, very serious co...
DAVID SCHEFFER
We are appealing to the United States as a world leader in human rights ... to urge the Chinese gove...
FALUN GONG
Human rights is the only ideology that deserves to survive,
SIMON WIESENTHAL
Take me to the height where success would seek my help to succeed!
I ARE
Everyone keeps talking about being concerned about the consumers' rights. But I feel the children's ...
ADELFA CALLEJO
Another key element of human ecology is the inviolability of human life, especially at its beginning...
POPE JOHN PAUL II
The world must know that America holds to the highest standards of military conduct and human rights...
BARBARA MIKULSKI
'The Handmaid's Tale' is a human story, and women's rights are human rights, and it&...
YVONNE STRAHOVSKI
I think all Americans believe in human rights. And health is an often overlooked aspect of basic hum...
JIMMY CARTER
At this stage we are working on third-hand information. We know our rights to that deposit and now w...
CON FAUCONNIER
If you're part of the chain of events that make that happen, then your human rights responsibility a...
ALEX NEVE
[T]here are some human rights that are so deep that we can't negotiate them away. I mean people do h...
HELEN PREJEAN
My belief has always been . . . that wherever in this land any individual's constitutional rights ar...
RONALD REAGAN
International politics is never about democracy and human rights. It's about the interests of states...
EGON BAHR
their involvement in illicit activity is one, their human rights practices are another, their weapon...
ADAM ERELI
The possibility that a small number of states with deeply troubling human rights records could block...
PEGGY HICKS
On the whole, it is the rights and freedoms of all citizens that are crucial in Saudi Arabia and fro...
BASMAH BINT SAUD
The UN Commission on Human Rights, whose membership in recent years has included countries - such as...
JOHN LINDER
We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independant, that f...
THOMAS JEFFERSON
Those who deny any group of people human rights are really denying the humanity of that group - and ...
CHRISTINA ENGELA
Opportunity means advancing American values in the world by protecting human rights, meeting human n...
JOSEPH LIEBERMAN
[In the wake of his comments last month that he would not apply an abortion-rights] litmus test ... ...
GLORIA FELDT
Some values must be universal, like human rights and the equal worth of every human being.
BJORN ULVAEUS
When the shallow critics denounce the profit motive inherent in our system of private enterprise, th...
DWIGHT DAVID EISENHOWER
To me, the European Union says there is a charter that protects you; you have fundamental rights, an...
CARLES PUIGDEMONT
I always believed that women have rights and that there are some women that are intelligent enough t...
SHAKIRA
Both democracy and human rights are relative concepts and not absolute and general,
JIANG ZEMIN
Right now, animals are generally considered property. Animals do not have rights in the sense that h...
ERIC SANDGREN
Those who have been outspoken in advocating human rights during these last forty years, have themsel...
ALI KHAMENEI

More Tom Stoppard

Good things, when short, are twice as good.
TOM STOPPARD
Time is short, life is short, there's a lot to know. So I skip the entertainers in the newspaper...
TOM STOPPARD
The thing that happens remarkably often is that the people who are writing a dissertation believe th...
TOM STOPPARD
I'm offended by things and take pathetic little stands against them.
TOM STOPPARD
My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
TOM STOPPARD
The text loses its virginity simply by being staged: it's no longer the abstract ideal version; ...
TOM STOPPARD
I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones...
TOM STOPPARD
Any revival in which I am involved is liable to change.
TOM STOPPARD
Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.
TOM STOPPARD
All your life, you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. An...
TOM STOPPARD
Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
TOM STOPPARD
The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with t...
TOM STOPPARD
For me, human rights simply endorse a view of life and a set of moral values that are perfectly clea...
TOM STOPPARD
Every exit is an entry somewhere else.
TOM STOPPARD
It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.
TOM STOPPARD
Obviously, you would give your life for your children, or give them the last biscuit on the plate. B...
TOM STOPPARD
From as long as, literally as far back as I can remember I've liked puns, word jokes, I can lite...
TOM STOPPARD
I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term w...
TOM STOPPARD
A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.
TOM STOPPARD
When I was 20, in 1957, and maybe you would say I was old enough to know better, but nevertheless, I...
TOM STOPPARD
We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain.
TOM STOPPARD
The notion that the 'leader' has the right to ask huge sacrifices of your generation for a n...
TOM STOPPARD
When I was a reporter in Bristol, which I was between the years 1954 and 1960, the newspaper would g...
TOM STOPPARD
In January 1962, when I was the author of one and a half unperformed plays, I attended a student pro...
TOM STOPPARD
Life is a gamble at terrible odds, if it were a bet, you would not take it.
TOM STOPPARD
My family was in Singapore when the Japanese War started. We were in Singapore at the time of Pearl ...
TOM STOPPARD
It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing.
TOM STOPPARD
Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?
TOM STOPPARD
My brain cells are dying in their trillions.
TOM STOPPARD
Age is a high price to pay for maturity.
TOM STOPPARD
In Chekhov, everything blends into its opposite, just fractionally, and this is sort of unsettling. ...
TOM STOPPARD
It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.
TOM STOPPARD
Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
TOM STOPPARD
Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.
TOM STOPPARD
The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.
TOM STOPPARD
Every exit is an entry somewhere.
TOM STOPPARD
I don't think I can be expected to take seriously any game which takes less than three days to reach...
TOM STOPPARD
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picni...
TOM STOPPARD
We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our prog...
TOM STOPPARD
We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the r...
TOM STOPPARD
Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.
TOM STOPPARD
It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
TOM STOPPARD
If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.
TOM STOPPARD
Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.
TOM STOPPARD
From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.
TOM STOPPARD
I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.
TOM STOPPARD
If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice.
TOM STOPPARD
A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it...
TOM STOPPARD
In 2005, I got an email from Belarus Free Theatre. They were emailing playwrights in America and Eng...
TOM STOPPARD
A 'human right' is, by definition, timeless. It cannot adhere to some societies and not othe...
TOM STOPPARD
I feel that when I began writing, I had a need to know more about the play before I got into it. I t...
TOM STOPPARD
My intention still is to write a play to commemorate, possibly rather skeptically, the 50th annivers...
TOM STOPPARD
I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put ...
TOM STOPPARD
Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.
TOM STOPPARD
A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
TOM STOPPARD
People have quite a simple idea about 'Anna Karenina.' They feel that the novel is entirely ...
TOM STOPPARD
I have about a dozen cassettes lying about which I use in random order. Very often, I pick up a cass...
TOM STOPPARD
I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of h...
TOM STOPPARD
What Tolstoy is on about is that carnal love is not a good idea.
TOM STOPPARD
Very often in Chekhov, where he exhibits a little bit of human behavior that you recognize as true, ...
TOM STOPPARD
Chekhov understood that people are mysterious and can't be reduced to what we nowadays call '...
TOM STOPPARD
I am not a mathematician, but I was aware that for centuries, mathematics was considered the queen o...
TOM STOPPARD
Success is a sort of metaphysical experience. I live exactly as I did before - only on a slightly bi...
TOM STOPPARD
There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we misse...
TOM STOPPARD
Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very...
TOM STOPPARD
If you let the plot be determined by what you feel is in the character's mind at that point, it ...
TOM STOPPARD
I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocrac...
TOM STOPPARD
One of the attractions of translating 'Heroes' is that it's not the kind of play that I ...
TOM STOPPARD
It is easily and often overlooked that when Thomas Jefferson asserted that life, liberty and the pur...
TOM STOPPARD
After all these years, I definitely associate having a pen in my hand with having an ashtray just ou...
TOM STOPPARD
Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the playwright got ther...
TOM STOPPARD
I barely remembered my father; I'm confused between genuine memory and the few photographs that ...
TOM STOPPARD
I'm good at being funny.
TOM STOPPARD
If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of...
TOM STOPPARD
A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, pop...
TOM STOPPARD
If I hadn't left Czechoslovakia, I would have been dead.
TOM STOPPARD
I just happen to know quite a lot of what happened in Czechoslovakia between 1968 and the fall of Co...
TOM STOPPARD
I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don't feel Czech.
TOM STOPPARD
Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a...
TOM STOPPARD
Each move is dictated by the previous one--that is the meaning of order
TOM STOPPARD
Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move...
TOM STOPPARD
Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.
TOM STOPPARD
The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and info...
TOM STOPPARD
One doesn't want one's democracy to behave like a dictatorial or fascistic police. One doesn...
TOM STOPPARD
Rosencrantz: Do you think death could possibly be a boat?
Guildenstern: No, no, no...Death is......
TOM STOPPARD
Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything...de...
TOM STOPPARD
It's better to be quotable than to be honest.
TOM STOPPARD
Life in a box is better than no life at all ... I expect.
TOM STOPPARD
The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.
TOM STOPPARD
We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on ...
TOM STOPPARD
Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?
TOM STOPPARD
The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always ...
TOM STOPPARD
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
TOM STOPPARD
If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of...
TOM STOPPARD
I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
TOM STOPPARD
I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to the death your right to say it.
TOM STOPPARD
Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God
TOM STOPPARD
We're actors - we're the opposite of people.
TOM STOPPARD
It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.
TOM STOPPARD
Pirates could happen to anyone.
TOM STOPPARD
Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything... d...
TOM STOPPARD
I think I enlist comedy to a serious purpose.
TOM STOPPARD
That I have the right to express myself freely at all times in all circumstances entails the idea th...
TOM STOPPARD
In the end, my children put me on to Pink Floyd when they were teenagers.
TOM STOPPARD
Pink Floyd are one of a handful of bands I've listened to a lot and whose concerts I've been...
TOM STOPPARD
When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need fi...
TOM STOPPARD
You do know what's coming up when you're translating. I suppose the concentration, then, is ...
TOM STOPPARD
Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.
TOM STOPPARD
For me, the reputation for teaching language in general, and East European languages most particular...
TOM STOPPARD
Like many people, I only knew of Ford Madox Ford through a book called 'The Good Soldier,' w...
TOM STOPPARD
A free press needs to be a respected press.
TOM STOPPARD
He's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks the most interesting thing about any st...
TOM STOPPARD
I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something th...
TOM STOPPARD
In the period before the arrival of Mrs. Thatcher, politics had been in such low esteem. Everything ...
TOM STOPPARD
It is no light matter to put in jeopardy a single life when it is the very singularity of each life ...
TOM STOPPARD
Chater: You dare to call me that. I demand satisfaction!

Septimus: Mrs Chater demanded sa...
TOM STOPPARD
THOMASINA:
But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great...
TOM STOPPARD
Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie t...
TOM STOPPARD
My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation f...
TOM STOPPARD
I'm not one of those writers who insist they don't read reviews and don't care much abou...
TOM STOPPARD
All of my scripts are based on other people's novels. Generally, I consider myself as one who wr...
TOM STOPPARD
Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it.
TOM STOPPARD
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that a...
TOM STOPPARD
Lou Reed was a hero because he was an anti-hero.
TOM STOPPARD
Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?
TOM STOPPARD
It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can w...
TOM STOPPARD
[Now] Bach ... a splash in the making.
TOM STOPPARD
What a fine persecution - to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.
TOM STOPPARD
Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge t...
TOM STOPPARD
If you took away everything in the world that had to be invented, there'd be nothing left except a l...
TOM STOPPARD
Get me inside any boardroom and I'll get any decision I want.
TOM STOPPARD
The sense of suppression, ... or self-suppression, and pressure generally which came off even this p...
TOM STOPPARD
James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be un...
TOM STOPPARD
The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility withou...
TOM STOPPARD
My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other...
TOM STOPPARD
A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's ...
TOM STOPPARD
Eternity's a terrible thought
TOM STOPPARD
We've traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without poss...
TOM STOPPARD
We're actors. We're the opposite of people.
TOM STOPPARD
the bewilderment and incomprehension of critics and audience.
TOM STOPPARD
It's wholly deserved and I am completely thrilled. As a writer he has been unswerving for 50 years, ...
TOM STOPPARD
wholly deserved and I'm completely thrilled.
TOM STOPPARD
Every exit is an entrance somewhere else
TOM STOPPARD
I don't respond well to the Olympic noise, which is the noise of nationalistic triumphalism.
TOM STOPPARD
Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a ...
TOM STOPPARD
Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!
TOM STOPPARD
I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has ne...
TOM STOPPARD
It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to...
TOM STOPPARD
It would have been nice to have had unicorns.
TOM STOPPARD
It's where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is g...
TOM STOPPARD
It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has ...
TOM STOPPARD
Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That remin...
TOM STOPPARD
I actually went to an Oasis concert. I thought they were a brilliant songwriting band.
TOM STOPPARD
You can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.
TOM STOPPARD
Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherw...
TOM STOPPARD
Carnal embrace is sexual congress, which is the insertion of the male genital organ into the female ...
TOM STOPPARD
HANNAH: Don't let Bernard get to you. It's only performance art, you know. Rhetoric, they used to te...
TOM STOPPARD
Life is a gamble at terrible odds, if it were a bet, you would not take it
TOM STOPPARD
A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
TOM STOPPARD
It is an interesting view of atheism, as a sort of "crutch" for those who can't stand the reality of...
TOM STOPPARD
The idea of the state is, or should be, a very limited, prescribed idea. The state looks after the d...
TOM STOPPARD
I have a spasm of envy for the person that was killed by a falling bookcase, as long as it doesn'...
TOM STOPPARD
I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values again...
TOM STOPPARD
What is the society we wish to protect? Is it the society of complete surveillance for the commonwea...
TOM STOPPARD
Even when the writing seems very frivolous, I'm puritanical. I don't mean my subject matter....
TOM STOPPARD
The idea that public safety, the safety of the innocent, is an absolute which trumps every other con...
TOM STOPPARD
I feel overestimated.
TOM STOPPARD
I'm not a theoretician about playwriting, but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitche...
TOM STOPPARD
We're actors — we're the opposite of people!
TOM STOPPARD
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something w...
TOM STOPPARD
As a writer, Harold has been unswerving for 50 years,
TOM STOPPARD
If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any g...
TOM STOPPARD
I don't do interviews under false pretenses.
TOM STOPPARD
Despite the digital age, there is a very large number of venues and spaces that are looking for play...
TOM STOPPARD
I'm not like some other writers: I have no actual urgent need or desire to add to what's wri...
TOM STOPPARD
I've voted in every election - not always for the same political party and never with any degree...
TOM STOPPARD
I'm vaguely embarrassed by myself sometimes.
TOM STOPPARD
As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an ex...
TOM STOPPARD
I like dialogue that is slightly more brittle than life. I have always admired and wished to write o...
TOM STOPPARD
When I think of how things could have turned out, I feel as if I've dodged, not just bullets, bu...
TOM STOPPARD
I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have...
TOM STOPPARD
My scripts are possibly too talkative. Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally ...
TOM STOPPARD
Nobody would be killed on the roads if the speed limit were 10 miles an hour.
TOM STOPPARD
There we were - demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man...
TOM STOPPARD
Theater in New York is nearer to the street. In London, you have to go deep into the building, usual...
TOM STOPPARD
I don't think falling in love in Slovakia is much different from falling in love in Tunbridge We...
TOM STOPPARD
GUIL: It [Hamlet's madness] really boils down to symptoms. Pregnant replies, mystic allusions, mista...
TOM STOPPARD
A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.
TOM STOPPARD
There are certain sorts of jokes which have only to do with the substitution of the unexpected word ...
TOM STOPPARD
Schepisi is the sort of director who could, would, and frequently did phone me whenever he came acro...
TOM STOPPARD
Directors sometimes have good ideas that I wished I'd had, not on rewriting but simply on stagin...
TOM STOPPARD
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that...
TOM STOPPARD
The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.
TOM STOPPARD
You end up going to school plays quite a bit as a parent, there are a lot of kids who are doing the ...
TOM STOPPARD
Free to move, speak, extemporize, and yet. We have not been cut loose. Our truancy is defined by on...
TOM STOPPARD
Let me get it straight. Your father was king. You were his only son. Your father dies. You are of ag...
TOM STOPPARD
As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it...
TOM STOPPARD
All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and...
TOM STOPPARD
We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.
TOM STOPPARD
Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway.
Guildenstern: What?
Rosencrantz: England.
...
TOM STOPPARD