Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Tom Stoppard
Tom Stoppard Quotes
154 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to the death your right to say it.
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
Since we cannot hope for order let us withdraw with style from the chaos.
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
Bakunin: Act first! The ideas will follow, and if not — well, it's progress
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
I had no idea Gwendolen knew any foreign languages, and I am not sure that I approve. It's the sort of thing that can only broaden a girl's mind.
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said no. But somehow we missed it.
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
It's no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst.
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
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.
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
I don't think I can be expected to take seriously any game which takes less than three days to reach its conclusion.
A cricket enthusiast on baseball
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
Turgenev: The names for things don't come first. Words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
An essentially private man [James Joyce] who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
The kind of person who embarks on an endless leap-frog down to the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Endlessly.
On himself
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
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.
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
Alexander:
No spunk, simple as that! Your brother's an army deserter!
Michael:
Oh yes, I've resigned my commission.
Alexander:
He's refusing to return to duty.
Michael:
On grounds of ill health, Papa. I'm sick of the Army.
Alexander:
No discipline, that's the problem!
Michael:
No, it's riddled with discipline, that's the problem. That and Poland.
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
They loved, and quarreled, and made up, and loved, and fought, and were true to each other and untrue.
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
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?
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Player: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life question your situation at every turn.
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
Biography is the mesh through which our real life escapes.
Tom Stoppard
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Quote of the day
Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.
Martin Luther
Tom Stoppard
Creative Commons
Born:
July 3, 1937
(age 86)
Bio:
Sir Tom Stoppard is a British playwright and screenwriter, knighted in 1997.
Known for:
Arcadia (1966)
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966)
The Real Thing (1980)
Travesties (1975)
The Invention of Love (1997)
Most used words:
people
love
time
life
artist
knowledge
alexander
war
write
thought
death
truth
moment
philosophy
idea
Tom Stoppard on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Tom Stoppard Quotes
Tom Stoppard Short Quotes
Quotes about Tom Stoppard
British Playwright Quotes
Playwright Quotes
20th-century Playwright Quotes
Related People
Robert Harris
English Novelist
Harold Pinter
British Playwright
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes