Tom Stoppard Quotes - Page 7

Get me inside any boardroom and I'll get any decision I want.

I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design.

I didn't feel good about cutting out parts of very famous speeches, ... You think you somehow need all of it or you get none of it, but that's not true.

You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?

If you were handed power on a plate you'd be left fighting over a plate.

Act first! The ideas will follow, and if not - well, it's progress

Obviously, you would give your life for your children, or give them the last biscuit on the plate. But to me, the trick in life is to take that sense of generosity between kin, make it apply to the extended family and to your neighbour, your village and beyond.

No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.

If rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!

Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything!

For 10 years of my life, 3 times a day, I thanked the Lord for what I was about to receive and thanked him again for what I had just received, and then we lost touch and I suddenly thought, where is he now

No problem is insoluble, given a big enough plastic bag.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.

Public postures have the configuration of private derangement.

We're actors. We're the opposite of people.

You can persuade a man to believe almost anything provided he is clever enough, but it is much more difficult to persuade someone less clever.

We must be born with an intuition of mortality.

Wars are fought for oil wells and coaling stations; for control of the Dardanelles or the Suez Canal; for colonial pickings to buy cheap in and conquered markets to sell dear in. War is capitalism with the gloves off.

It seems pointless to be quoted if one isn't going to be quotable ... it's better to be quotable than honest.

Theater is a recreation. It can be much more, but unless it's recreation, I don't see the point of it.

I'm vaguely embarrassed by myself sometimes.

Of all forms of fiction, autobiography is the most gratuitous.

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.

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.