Quotes by Playwrights - Page 153

Motormouth: So this is love? Well, love is a gift and a lot of people forget that. So you two better brace yourselves for a whole lot of ugly coming your way on a never ending train of stupid.Penny: So you met my mom?
Mark O'Donnell
I am a human being, so nothing human is strange to me.
Terence
One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
Alan Bennett
I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being, just as you are--or, at all events, that I must try and become one.
Henrik Ibsen
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.
William Shakespeare
Your friends are all the dullest dogs I know. They are not beautiful: they are only decorated. They are not clean: they are only shaved and starched. They are not dignified: they are only fashionably dressed. They are not educated: they are only college passmen. They are not religious: they are only pewrenters. They are not moral: they are only conventional. They are not virtuous: they are only cowardly. They are not even vicious: they are only “frail.” They are not artistic: they are only lascivious. They are not prosperous: they are only rich. They are not loyal, they are only servile; not dutiful, only sheepish; not public spirited, only patriotic; not courageous, only quarrelsome; not determined, only obstinate; not masterful, only domineering; not self-controlled, only obtuse; not self-respecting, only vain; not kind, only sentimental; not social, only gregarious; not considerate, only polite; not intelligent, only opinionated; not progressive, only factious; not imaginative, only superstitious; not just, only vindictive; not generous, only propitiatory; not disciplined, only cowed; and not truthful at all: liars every one of them, to the very backbone of their souls.
George Bernard Shaw
A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most.
George Bernard Shaw
Rhetoric is what shapes history, if not truth.
Anna Deavere Smith
It’s happened before. It’s all happened before. History is worth shit.
Larry Kramer
Look at the longing, the anguish of a sad fossil world / that cannot find the accent of its first sob.
Federico García Lorca
History proved many times that path of millions was often the wrong path!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The unfortunate Elizabeth Bathori was said to bathe in the blood of young girls in order to preserve her youth and beauty. Apparently more than 600 maidens went down the drain before anyone noticed something amiss at the castle. How very inobservant the neighbors must have been.
Robert Dunbar
Is your country under great dangers? Light is gone and the darkness is everywhere? You don’t know whom to trust and what to do? Read the history of your country! There you will find out the best map for the way out!
Mehmet Murat ildan
He is not a great man. None of us are great men. We are just caught in the wave of history.
Dave Malloy
Every nation needs a crystal clear mirror to see its stupidities, to see its hypocrisies, to see its faults and its evils! No nation is saint! Every nation’s history is full of primitiveness and barbarity, full of wars and murders! Let every nation sees its face very clearly! Let them face their faces so that in the future they may be something better!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Lucky nation is the one who has at least one great progressive revolutionary man in its history!
Mehmet Murat ildan
As everyone knows, it is a thousand times easier to reconstruct the facts of what happened at a certain time than its intellectual atmosphere. The atmosphere is reflected not in official events but, most conspicuously, in small, personal episodes...
Stefan Zweig
If we could learn to look instead of gawking,We'd see the horror in the heart of farce,If only we could act instead of talking,We wouldn't always end up on our arse.This was the thing that nearly had us mastered;Don't yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,The bitch that bore him is in heat again.
Bertolt Brecht
A tormenting thought: as of a certain point, history was no longer real. Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality; everything happening since then was supposedly not true; but we supposedly didn't notice. Our task would now be to find that point, and as long as we didn't have it, we would be forced to abide in our present destruction.
Elias Canetti
This tottered ensign of my ancestorsWhich swept the desert shore of that dead seaWhereof we got the name of Mortimer,Will I advance upon these castle-walls.Drums, strike alarum, raise them from their sport,And sing aloud the knell of Gaveston!
Christopher Marlowe
The Noblest form of Affection
Oscar Wilde
In any case, Cide Hamete Benengeli was a very careful historian, and very accurate in all things, as can be clearly seen in the details he relates to us, for although they are trivial and inconsequential, he does not attempt to pass over them in silence; his example could be followed by solemn historians who recount actions so briefly and succinctly that we can barely taste them, and leave behind in the inkwell, through carelessness, malice, or ignorance, the most substantive part of the work.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
In Santiago, the capital of the kingdom of Chile, at the moment of the great earthquake of 1647 in which many thousands lost their lives, a young Spaniard called Jeronimo Rugera was standing beside one of the pillars in the prison to which he had been committed on a criminal charge, and he was about to hang himself.
Heinrich von Kleist
He knew by heart every last minute crack on its surface. He had made maps of the ceiling and gone exploring on them; rivers, islands, and continents. He had made guessing games of it and discovered hidden objects; faces, birds, and fishes. He made mathematical calculations of it and rediscovered his childhood; theorems, angles, and triangles. There was practically nothing else he could do but look at it. He hated the sight of it.
Josephine Tey
History can come in handy. If you were born yesterday, with no knowledge of the past, you might easily accept whatever the government tells you. But knowing a bit of history--while it would not absolutely prove the government was lying in a given instance--might make you skeptical, lead you to ask questions, make it more likely that you would find out the truth.
Howard Zinn
If somebody tells you ‘History will never forgive you,’ just laugh at him! Because when the history comes, you won’t be here! The threat of history never forgives you is a useless threat!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The ages live in history through their anachronisms.
Oscar Wilde
In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles.
Graham Greene
Tell me, before you call us servants, who served whom? And who, I wonder, in your generations, will immortalize you?
Peter Shaffer
You can't be neutral on a moving train.
Howard Zinn
Sound drums and trumpets! Farewell sour annoy! For here, I hope, begins our lasting joy.
William Shakespeare
But then what is the alternative to trying to tell the truth about the Holocaust, the Famine, the Armenian genocide, the injustice of dispossession in the Americas and Australia? That everyone should be reduced to silence? To pretend that the Holocaust was the work merely of a well-armed minority who didn’t do as much harm as is claimed-and likewise, to argue that the Irish Famine was either an inevitability or the fault of the Irish-is to say that both were mere unreliable rumors, and not the great motors of history they so obviously proved to be. It suited me to think so at the time, but still I believe it to be true, that if there are going to be areas of history which are off-bounds, then in principle we are reduced to fudging, to cosmetic narrative.
Thomas Keneally
My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.
Howard Zinn
Tyranny is Tyranny, let it come from whom it may.
Howard Zinn
It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
Alan Bennett
When I was in school I studied biology. I learned that in making their experiments scientists will take some group--bacteria, mice, people--and subject that group to certain conditions. They compare the results with a second group which has not been disturbed. This second group is called the control group. It is the control group which enables the scientist gauge the effect of his experiment. To judge the significance of what has occurred. In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who o not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God--who knows all that can be known--seems powerless to change.
Cormac McCarthy
How do I define history? It's just one fucking thing after another
Alan Bennett
History is important. If you don't know history it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it.
Howard Zinn
Never say more than is necessary.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.
Oscar Wilde
The ages live in history through their anachronisms.
Oscar Wilde
In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles.
Graham Greene
Tell me, before you call us servants, who served whom? And who, I wonder, in your generations, will immortalize you?
Peter Shaffer
You can't be neutral on a moving train.
Howard Zinn
Sound drums and trumpets! Farewell sour annoy! For here, I hope, begins our lasting joy.
William Shakespeare
But then what is the alternative to trying to tell the truth about the Holocaust, the Famine, the Armenian genocide, the injustice of dispossession in the Americas and Australia? That everyone should be reduced to silence? To pretend that the Holocaust was the work merely of a well-armed minority who didn’t do as much harm as is claimed-and likewise, to argue that the Irish Famine was either an inevitability or the fault of the Irish-is to say that both were mere unreliable rumors, and not the great motors of history they so obviously proved to be. It suited me to think so at the time, but still I believe it to be true, that if there are going to be areas of history which are off-bounds, then in principle we are reduced to fudging, to cosmetic narrative.
Thomas Keneally
My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.
Howard Zinn
Tyranny is Tyranny, let it come from whom it may.
Howard Zinn
It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
Alan Bennett
When I was in school I studied biology. I learned that in making their experiments scientists will take some group--bacteria, mice, people--and subject that group to certain conditions. They compare the results with a second group which has not been disturbed. This second group is called the control group. It is the control group which enables the scientist gauge the effect of his experiment. To judge the significance of what has occurred. In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who o not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God--who knows all that can be known--seems powerless to change.
Cormac McCarthy
How do I define history? It's just one fucking thing after another
Alan Bennett
History is important. If you don't know history it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it.
Howard Zinn
Never say more than is necessary.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.
Oscar Wilde
There are still very few laws against thinking, although I am sure they're working hard on that in Washington.
Jeff Lindsay
I've long suspected dogs of being much smarter than people; I was even certain they could speak, but there was only some kind of stubbornness in them. They're extraordinary politicians: they notice every human step.
Nikolai Gogol
Beauty is more a danger than intelligence or wit. One becomes a living mirror for the inadequacies of others.
Gordon Dahlquist
Oh, yes. I'm terribly smart. Wouldn't it have been nice... to be intelligent?
William Inge
Why do smart people exist, if not to figure out convoluted problems?
Mikhail Bulgakov
Sexual thrills are not all physical, and although Parlabane was an unlikely seducer, even on the intellectual plane, it was clear that his desire was, by this prolonged tickling, to bring me to an orgasm of the mind.
Robertson Davies