Quotes by Playwrights - Page 100

Because sometimes you have to do something bad to do something good.
Oscar Wilde
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
Oscar Wilde
Sometimes being a good mother gets in the way of being a good person.
Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey
They may talk of a comet, or a burning mountain, or some such bagatelle; but to me a modest woman, dressed out in all her finery, is the most tremendous object of the whole creation.
Oliver Goldsmith
Woman cannot be free until man’s mind is liberated from the megalomania! His self-exaltation is the mother of the gender inequalities. Till we eliminate his exacerbated narcissism, woman will remain unfree!
Mehmet Murat ildan
She was tall and dark-skinned and looked like a Nigerian sculpture. She moved like a lioness, her every step bristling with suppressed violence.
Bonnie Greer
Such indeed was her image, that neither could Shakespeare describe, nor Hogarth paint, nor Clive act, a fury in higher perfection.
Henry Fielding
You are perfectly right in making some slight alteration. Indeed, no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.
Oscar Wilde
A country where women are not free has no chance ever to be something good and respectable!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Woman is in love with the devil.
Nikolai Gogol
That just goes to show, remarked Pearlie, that you must never judge a woman in a kimono or a bathing suit.
Edna Ferber
HIGGINS [sitting down beside her] Rubbish! you shall marry an ambassador. You shall marry the Governor-General of India or the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, or somebody who wants a deputy-queen. I'm not going to have my masterpiece thrown away on Freddy.LIZA. You think I like you to say that. But I haven't forgot what you said a minute ago; and I won't be coaxed round as if I was a baby or a puppy. If I can't have kindness, I'll have independence.HIGGINS. Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.LIZA [rising determinedly] I'll let you see whether I'm dependent on you. If you can preach, I can teach. I'll go and be a teacher.HIGGINS. What'll you teach, in heaven's name?LIZA. What you taught me. I'll teach phonetics.HIGGINS. Ha! Ha! Ha!
George Bernard Shaw
There were usually not nearly as many sick people inside the hospital as Yossarian saw outside the hospital, and there were generally fewer people inside the hospital who were seriously sick. There was a much lower death rate inside the hospital than outside the hospital, and a much healthier death rate. Few people died unnecessarily. People knew a lot more about dying inside the hospital and made a much neater job of it. They couldn’t dominate Death inside the hospital, but they certainly made her behave. They had taught her manners. They couldn’t keep Death out, but while she was there she had to act like a lady. People gave up the ghost with delicacy and taste inside the hospital. There was none of that crude, ugly ostentation about dying that was so common outside of the hospital. They did not blow-up in mid-air like Kraft or the dead man in Yossarian’s tent, or freeze to death in the blazing summertime the way Snowden had frozen to death after spilling his secret to Yossarian in the back of the plane.“I’m cold,” Snowden had whimpered. “I’m cold.”“There, there,” Yossarian had tried to comfort him. “There, there.”They didn’t take it on the lam weirdly inside a cloud the way Clevinger had done. They didn’t explode into blood and clotted matter. They didn’t drown or get struck by lightning, mangled by machinery or crushed in landslides. They didn’t get shot to death in hold-ups, strangled to death in rapes, stabbed to death in saloons, blugeoned to death with axes by parents or children, or die summarily by some other act of God. Nobody choked to death. People bled to death like gentlemen in an operating room or expired without comment in an oxygen tent. There was none of that tricky now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t business so much in vogue outside the hospital, none of that now-I-am-and-now-I-ain’t. There were no famines or floods. Children didn’t suffocate in cradles or iceboxes or fall under trucks. No one was beaten to death. People didn’t stick their heads into ovens with the gas on, jump in front of subway trains or come plummeting like dead weights out of hotel windows with a whoosh!, accelerating at the rate of thirty-two feet per second to land with a hideous plop! on the sidewalk and die disgustingly there in public like an alpaca sack full of hairy strawberry ice cream, bleeding, pink toes awry.
Joseph Heller
A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
Tom Stoppard
The asylum, and later the national health service, warehoused thousands of patients made mad by the intrusions of a sexual predator. But these institutions had been dominated by the discredited Freudian fantasy that sexual abuse doesn’t happen - that it is our illicit desires that drive us crazy. A century ago, Freud recoiled from his own theory of the sexual seduction of children and projected the problem back into the patient. He claimed in his Aetiology of Hysteria that clients, typically women, were describing their fantasies, not facts, not ‘real events’. P3
Beatrix Campbell
Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. Health is the primary duty of life.
Oscar Wilde
Better to hunt in fields, for health unbought,Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught.The wise, for cure, on exercise depend;God never made his work for man to mend.
John Dryden
But I see nothing miraculous about it. Nothing makes one as healthy as happiness, and there is no greater happiness than making someone else happy.
Stefan Zweig
Sleep is that golden chain that ties health and our bodies together.
Thomas Dekker
Personal finances are like people’s personal health, crucial and tragic to the sufferer but tedious to the listener.
Thomas Keneally
One knows so well the popular idea of health: the English country gentleman galloping after a fox - the unspeakable in full pursuit of the unbeatable.
Oscar Wilde
Justice is a machine that, when someone has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself. - John Galsworthy, Justice [1910], act II
John Galsworthy
Your edict, King, was strong,But all your strength is weakness itself againstThe immortal unrecorded laws of God.They are not merely now: they were, and shall be,Operative for ever, beyond man utterly.I knew I must die, even without your decree:I am only mortal. And if I must dieNow, before it is my time to die,Surely this is no hardship: can anyoneLiving, as I live, with evil all about me,Think Death less than a friend?
Sophocles
If there is no justice in a country, who can claim that, that country is a country? An injustice country is just a rubbish bin!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The primitive idea of justice is partly legalized revenge and partly expiation by sacrifice. It works out from both sides in the notion that two blacks make a white, and that when a wrong has been done, it should be paid for by an equivalent suffering. It seems to the Philistine majority a matter of course that this compensating suffering should be inflicted on the wrongdoer for the sake of its deterrent effect on other would-be wrongdoers; but a moment's reflection will shew that this utilitarian application corrupts the whole transaction. For example, the shedding of blood cannot be balanced by the shedding of guilty blood. Sacrificing a criminal to propitiate God for the murder of one of his righteous servants is like sacrificing a mangy sheep or an ox with the rinderpest: it calls down divine wrath instead of appeasing it. In doing it we offer God as a sacrifice the gratification of our own revenge and the protection of our own lives without cost to ourselves; and cost to ourselves is the essence of sacrifice and expiation.
George Bernard Shaw
All the buildings of justice will remain idle on the day when all men have high conscience!
Mehmet Murat ildan
You are unjust to women in England. And till you count what is a a shame in a woman to be an infamy in a man, you will always be unjust, and Right, that pillar of fire, and Wrong, that pillar of cloud, will be made dim to your eyes, or be not seen at all, or if seen, not regarded.
Oscar Wilde
The voice of the majority is no proof of justice
Friedrich Schiller
Hey you —All our fevered history won't instill insight,won't turn a body conscious,won't make that look in the eyes say yes, though there is nothingto solve even as each moment is an answer.
Claudia Rankine
In a just cause the weak will beat the strong!
Sophocles
When the law is wrong it's because it's unnatural, but in this case it is natural and a river will drown you if you buck it now
Arthur Miller
Oh, there were many here who were justly shot by unjust men.
Arthur Miller
...I am the first to say that ours is a complex and difficult country and some of our complexities are indeed grotesque. We who are Negro Americans can offer that last remark with unwavering insistence. It is, on the other hand, also a great nation with certain beautiful and indestructible traditions and potentials which can be seized by all of who possess imagination and love of man. There is, as a certain play suggests, a great deal to be fought in America - but, at the same time, there is so much which begs to be but re-affirmed and cherished with sweet defiance.
Lorraine Hansberry
Haemon: No city is property of a single man.Creon: But custom gives possession to the ruler.Haemon: You'd rule a desert beautifully alone.
Sophocles
A justice-thirsty country needs nothing but justice, neither bread nor anything else, only justice!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The gods are just, and of our pleasant vicesMake instruments to plague us.
William Shakespeare
Let there be no love poems writtenUntil love can exist freely andCleanly.
Amiri Baraka
Philosophy consists in moderating each life so that many lives will fit together with as much liberty and justice as will keep them together: and not so much as will make them fly apart, when the harm will be the greater.
Tom Stoppard
Hark, villains! I will grind your bones to dust. (Act V, Scene 2, 2503)
William Shakespeare
I beg for justice, which you, Prince, must give. Romeo killed Tybalt; Romeo must not live.
William Shakespeare
I think about that story a lot now. People in a boat, waiting, terrified, while implacable, unsmiling men, irresistibly strong, seize …. Maybe the person next to you, maybe you, and with no warning at all, with time only for a quick intake of air you are pitched into freezing, turbulent water and salt and darkness to drown.
Tony Kushner
Civil disobedience, as I put it to the audience, was not the problem, despite the warnings of some that it threatened social stability, that it led to anarchy. The greatest danger, I argued, was civil obedience, the submission of individual conscience to governmental authority. Such obedience led to the horrors we saw in totalitarian states, and in liberal states it led to the public's acceptance of war whenever the so-called democratic government decided on it...In such a world, the rule of law maintains things as they are. Therefore, to begin the process of change, to stop a war, to establish justice, it may be necessary to break the law, to commit acts of civil disobedience, as Southern black did, as antiwar protesters did.
Howard Zinn
ATHENA: There are two sides to this dispute. I've heard only one half the argument. (...) So you two parties, summon your witnesses, set out your proofs, with sworn evidence to back your stories. Once I've picked the finest men in Athens, I'll return. They'll rule fairly in this case, bound by a sworn oath to act with justice.
Aeschylus
For this new-married man approaching here,Whose salt imagination yet hath wrong'dYour well defended honour, you must pardonFor Mariana's sake: but as he adjudged your brother,--Being criminal, in double violationOf sacred chastity and of promise-breachThereon dependent, for your brother's life,--The very mercy of the law cries outMost audible, even from his proper tongue,'An Angelo for Claudio, death for death!'Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure;Like doth quit like, and MEASURE still FOR MEASURE
William Shakespeare
If you can bow in front of the justice at the height of your power, it means that you are really a just person!
Mehmet Murat ildan
My dear friend, to be both powerful and fair has always been difficult for mankind. Power and justice have always been seen like day and night; this being the case, when one of them is there the other disappears.
Mehmet Murat ildan
In case of dissension, never dare to judge till you've heard the other side.
Euripides
The cry of the poor is is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is.
Howard Zinn
Dreams can be of value even if you don’t have an opportunity to turn them into reality.
Henning Mankell
What an absurd thing it is to pass over all the valuable parts of a man, and fix our attention on his infirmities.
Joseph Addison
Every one-night-stand or man in a one-night-stand is like every other one-night-stand or man in a one-night-stand because the sex in a one-night-stand is without time and only time allows value.
Kathy Acker
Whatever you value, it becomes your sun! If you value a calm night, your own sun will rise with the sunset on the horizon!
Mehmet Murat ildan
For it falls outThat what we have we prize not to the worthWhiles we enjoy it, but being lacked and lost,Why, then we rack the value, then we findThe virtue that possession would not show usWhile it was ours.
William Shakespeare
Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.
Graham Greene
Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.
Tom Stoppard
When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself?
W Somerset Maugham
Anyone I love takes away part of my freedom, but in that case it is I who wished it; and there is so much pleasure in loving that one gladly sacrifices something for its sake. Any one who loves me takes away all my freedom. Anyone who admires me (as a writer) threatens to take it away from me. I even fear those who understand me, which is why I spend so much time covering my tracks - both in my private life and in the persona I express through my books. What would have delighted me, had I loved god, is the thought that god gives nothing in return.
Henry de Montherlant
At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world.
George Bernard Shaw
All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent
Tennessee Williams
The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief—call it what you will—than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counterattractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course.
A.A. Milne