FastSaying

Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!


Tom Stoppard

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For 'tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petard...
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a ...
TOM STOPPARD It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has ...
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 Most people who get into power in the western world start with great intentions, but slowly they all...
DAVID A. STEWART When we know what God is, we shall be gods ourselves.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW When we know what God is, we shall be gods ourselves
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW For 'tis the sport to have the enginer Hoist with his own petar, and 't shall go hard But I wi...
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE For 'Tis the sport to have the engineer hoisted with his own petard.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE It is important for the victims of abuse to know it is never their fault.
SHARI PULLIAM The Herondales are a rather infamous line, as you probably know. Many of them heroes, some of them t...
CASSANDRA CLARE 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 A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims... but acco...
GEORGE ORWELL We know all their gods; they ignore ours. What they call our sins are our gods, and what they call t...
NATALIE CLIFFORD BARNEY Either Tom Lee and partners are victims of fraud or they dropped the ball in terms of due diligence....
WILLIAM ATWOOD In the eyes of man, we were known as human beings. In the eyes of the Gods, we were their sons. Hist...
ENRIQUE VEGA The burden therefore rests with the American legal community and with the American human-rights lobb...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Men create the gods in their own image.
XENOPHANES The animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move fini...
HENRY BESTON Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.
BIBLE The Japanese even forced fathers to rape their own daughters or sons their mothers, brothers their s...
IRIS CHANG We march and fight, to death or on to victory. Our might is right, no traitors shall prevail. Our he...
GEORGE LINCOLN ROCKWELL How shall we learn to know ourselves? By reflection? Never; but only through action. Strive to do th...
JOHANN VON GOETHE How shall we learn to know ourselves? By reflection? Never; but only through action. Strive to do th...
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE Feast of Teresa of Avila, Mystic, Teacher, 1582 We shall never learn to know ourselves except b...
TERESA OF AVILA I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation. •George Bernard Shaw It is better ...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW Powerful people are not affected or infected by their environment. They refuse to be victims of othe...
DANNY SILK We should not blame people by the mistakes of others.
DANIEL MELGAçO Is killing a known terrorist wrong? I ask this, did the terrorist allow any of his victims quarter? ...
T.R. WALLACE We must adopt loathsome diseases for our familiar associates, or we shall never be thoroughly acquai...
JOHN ABERNETHY over and over victims are blamed for their assaults. and when we imply that victims bring on their o...
ANNA C. SALTER We shall never be understood or respected by the English until we carry our individuality to extreme...
HENRY LAWSON My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own l...
JOHN ADAMS Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. 'Tis ped...
RALPH WALDO EMERSON We shall escape the uphill by never turning back.
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI our people are getting rid of the traitors one by one.
YASSER ARAFAT We are not victims by nature...we are programmed to be victims...for good reason...if we truly embra...
GAIL MARIE MACLEAN The Constitution shall never be construed... to prevent the people of the United States who are peac...
SAMUEL ADAMS The constitution shall never be construed...to prevent the people of the United States who are peace...
ALEXANDER HAMILTON If cattle and horses, or lions, had hands, or were able to draw with their feet and produce the work...
XENOPHANES There shall never be another Ellie. We shall always be grateful for the chance we had to know him.
PETER ANGELOS Most people don’t require forgiveness for own committed sins from their victims or others because ...
ANUJ SOMANY If I know something, I am not a victim. Victims don't know the meaning of their suffering. I am an e...
RACHEL KLEIN We know of officers who develop inappropriate relationships with victims of domestic abuse. They hav...
THERESA MAY Men should be judged not by their tint of skin, the gods they serve, the vintage they drink, nor by ...
LAURENCE HOPE Men should be judged not by their tint of skin, the gods they serve, the vintage they drink, nor by ...
ADELA FLORENCE NICOLSON We mute the realization of malevolence- which is too threatening to bear - by turning offenders into...
ANNA C. SALTER The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings...
ALDOUS HUXLEY The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings...
ALDOUS HUXLEY As to whether the people who were supposedly to put up the money and did put it up or whether it was...
PETER PORTER We're all victims of our own hubris at times.
KEVIN SPACEY We shall never know all the good that a simple smile can do.
MOTHER TERESA We shall never know all the good that a simple smile can do.
MOTHER TERESA OF CALCUTTA The capacity of sex offenders for denial, rationalization, and minimization of their deviant behavio...
HARVEY L. SCHWARTZ Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their m...
ARISTOTLE Either we shall find what it is we are seeking or at least we shall free ourselves from the persuasi...
PLATO Some have asked whether we shall know one another in heaven? Surely, our knowledge will not be dimin...
THOMAS WATSON Traitors are hated even by those whom they prefer.
SYRUS PUBLILIUS SYRUS Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win, By fearing to attempt.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE The fact is that men who know nothing of decency in their own lives are only too ready to launch fou...
PLUTARCH I guess you could say we are victims of our own success.
ALLISON HOOPER "A great teacher never retires, the only things that changes are, their spheres of influence." ~Tom ...
TOM BAKER AKA THE PONDERING MAN Economists create their own worlds. We're like little gods with our artificial economics, wantin...
EDWARD C. PRESCOTT The reason con artists get away with what they get away with is, their victims are ashamed of their ...
WALTER KIRN The unyielding resistance of the Cuban patriots is symbolized by our 5 Heroes. They shall never back...
FIDEL CASTRO The Plagiarism of orators is the art, or an ingenious and easy mode, which some adroitly employ to ...
ISAAC D'ISRAELI You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to ...
THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH For that was the terrible power of the dementors: to force their victims to relive the worst memorie...
J.K. ROWLING We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own go...
HERMAN MELVILLE Shall we judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON The gods' most savage curses come upon us as answers to our own prayers, you know
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD As for marigolds, poppies, hollyhocks, and valorous sunflowers, we shall never have a garden withou...
HENRY WARD BEECHER As for marigolds, poppies, hollyhocks, and valorous sunflowers, we shall never have a garden without...
HENRY WARD BEECHER Victims declare,“The world is responsible for me,” and never do anything to better their quality...
HENRY CLOUD no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoeve...
THOMAS JEFFERSON "Shallow answers never find their way to the bottom of the bucket. They just float around on the sur...
TOM BAKER AKA THE PONDERING MAN It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, ...
ADAM SMITH It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, b...
ADAM SMITH Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. Thi...
JEAN BAUDRILLARD I think there's a bittersweet element to this in that yes, our friend Tom isn't coming home. But we ...
ANNE BACON People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, ...
E.M. FORSTER People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, ...
E. M. FORSTER He who shall hurt the little wren / Shall never be beloved by men.
WILLIAM BLAKE Liberty, then, is the sovereignty of the individual, and never shall man know liberty until each and...
JOSIAH WARREN Almighty God hath created the mind free. All attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or bur...
THOMAS JEFFERSON Our doubts are traitors,
And make us lose the good we oft might win
By fearing to attempt.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Our doubts are traitors,
and make us lose the good we oft might win,
by fearing to attem...
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE When the Strident Voices of Dissent loudly rise up from the Wilderness of Mann, the High-Flying Feat...
P. A. MONSON What a wretched lot of old shrivelled creatures we shall be by-and-by. Never mind - the uglier we ge...
GEORGE ELIOT We shall never arrive at true meekness by any other way than by humiliating ourselves and by honorin...
JOHN CALVIN The parents have a right to say that no teacher paid by their money shall rob their children of fait...
WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN The parents have a right to say that no teacher paid by their money shall rob their children of fait...
WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN Some never recognize or will even acknowledge their own personal lack of education or intelligence, ...
MIKE E. KNEZEVICH, JR. You know what it is? Alot of these people are just now jumping on the 'we hate Tom' band waggon. I'v...
BLINK 182 Selfish— a judgment readily passed by those who have never tested their own power of sacrifice.
GEORGE ELIOT

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 The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelli...
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 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