Quotes from Tom Stoppard

Words) deserve respect. Get the right ones in the right order, and you can nudge the world a little.

Now for a handful of guilders I happen to have a private and uncut performance of the rape of the Sabine Women - or rather woman, or rather Alfred -Get your skirt on Alfred!

If we can't arrange our own happiness, it's a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us.

You are an over-excited little man, with a need for self-expression far beyond the scope of your natural gifts. This is not discreditable. Neither does it make you an artist.

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

THOMASINA: But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue!

Gallons of ink and miles of typewriter ribbon expended on the misery of the unrequited lover; not a word about the utter tedium of the unrequiting.

Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

I must stop compromising my plays with this whiff of social application. They must be entirely untouched by any suspicion of usefulness.

HENRY: You don't get visited by happiness like being lucky with the weather. The weather is the weather. DEBBIE: And happiness? HENRY: Happiness is . . . equilibrium. Shift your weight.

You don't mind? Life is in the minding.

LADY CROOM: You have been reading too many novels by Mrs Radcliffe, that is my opinion. This is a garden for The Castle of Otranto or The Mysteries of Udolpho -- CHATER: The Castle of Otranto, my lady, is by Horace Walpole. NOAKES: (Thrilled) Mr Walpole the gardener?! LADY CROOM: Mr Chater, you are a welcome guest at Sidley Park but while you are one, The Castle of Otranto was written by whomsoever I say it was, otherwise what is the point of being a guest or having one?

Don't clap too loudly—it's a very old world.

What is an artist? For every thousand people there's nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who's the artist.

People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse in the places where everybody is kept in the dark.

War is capitalism with the gloves off

Can't you function unless you're losing?

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

HANNAH: Don't let Bernard get to you. It's only performance art, you know. Rhetoric, they used to teach it in ancient times, like PT. It's not about being right, they had philosophy for that. Rhetoric was their chat show. Bernard's indignation is a sort of aerobics for when he gets on television.

I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to the death your right to say it.

I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you're either a revolutionary or you're not, and if you're not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can't be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary... I forget the third thing.

The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.

Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God's crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can't think of anything more trivial than quarks, quasars, big bangs, and black holes.