Tom Stoppard quotes - page 3

The days of the digitals are numbered. The metaphor is built into them like a self-destruct mechanism. (Tom Stoppard)
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. View quote
Tom Stoppard
There is presumably a calendar date - a moment - when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, secretly, the noes had it. View quote
Tom Stoppard
I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself. View quote
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. View quote
Tom Stoppard
Life in a box is better than no life at all... I expect. View quote
Tom Stoppard
A foreign correspondent is someone who lives in foreign parts and corresponds, usually in the form of essays containing no new facts. Otherwise he's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it. View quote
Tom Stoppard
Bakunin: Act first! The ideas will follow, and if not - well, it's progress. View quote
Tom Stoppard
Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving? View quote
Tom Stoppard
It seems pointless to be quoted if one isn't going to be quotable ... it's better to be quotable than honest. View quote
Tom Stoppard
For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure. (Tom Stoppard)
The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices-after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's. View quote
Tom Stoppard
What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed? View quote
Tom Stoppard
Chater: You dare to call me that. I demand satisfaction! Septimus: Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you are demanding satisfaction. I cannot spend my time day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family. View quote
Tom Stoppard
Well, we'll know better next time. View quote
Tom Stoppard
I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism. View quote
Tom 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! View quote
Tom Stoppard
Mageeba: Do you know what I mean by a relatively free press, Mr. Wagner? Wagner: Not exactly, sir, no. Mageeba: I mean a free press which is edited by one of my relatives. View quote
Tom Stoppard
Tzara: Causality is no longer fashionable owing to the war. Carr: How illogical, since the war itself had causes. I forget what they were, but it was all in the papers at the time. Something about brave little Belgium, wasn't it? Tzara: Was it? I thought it was Serbia... Carr: Brave little Serbia...? No, I don't think so. The newspapers would never have risked calling the British public to arms without a proper regard for succinct alliteration. View quote
Tom Stoppard
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. View quote
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)
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. View quote
Tom Stoppard
Michael: "March here, march there, present arms, where's your cap?" - you've no idea, the whole Army's obsessed with playing at soldiers. View quote
Tom Stoppard
Their coarseness is the sinew of some kind of brute confidence which is the reason England is home to every shade of political exile. They don't give asylum out of respect for asylum-seekers, but out of respect for themselves. They invented personal liberty, and they know it, and they did it without having any theories about it. They value liberty because it's liberty. View quote
Tom Stoppard
When someone disagrees with you on a moral point you assume that he is one step behind in his thinking, and he assumes that he has gone one step ahead. But I take both parts, O'Hara, leapfrogging myself along the great moral issues, refuting myself and rebutting the refutation towards a truth that must be the compound of two opposite half-truths. And you never reach it because there is always something more to say. View quote
Tom Stoppard