Quotes by Playwrights - Page 58

I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot.
George Bernard Shaw
Careful, Mr. Spiro, guns are dangerous. Especially the end with the hole.
Eoin Colfer
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.
Oscar Wilde
Nowadays what isn't worth saying is
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
If there is a media in a country which deceives its own people, that country needs no other enemy!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The BFMSS [British False Memory Syndrome Society]The founder of the 'false memory' movement in Britain is an accused father. Two of his adult daughters say that Roger Scotford sexually abused them in childhood. He denied this and responded by launching a spectacular counter-attack, which enjoyed apparently unlimited and uncritical air time in the mass media and provoke Establishment institutions that had made no public utterance about abuse to pronounce on the accused adults' repudiation of it.p171-172The 'British False Memory Syndrome Society' lent a scientific aura to the allegations - the alchemy of 'falsehood' and 'memory' stirred with disease and science. The new name pathologised the accusers and drew attention away from the accused. But the so-called syndrome attacked not only the source of the stories but also the alliances between the survivors' movement and practitioners in the health, welfare, and the criminal justice system. The allies were represented no longer as credulous dupes but as malevolent agents who imported a miasma of the 'false memories' into the imaginations of distressed victims.Roger Scotford was a former naval officer turned successful property developer living in a Georgian house overlooking an uninterrupted valley in luscious middle England. He was a rich man and was able to give up everything to devote himself to the crusade.He says his family life was normal and that he had been a 'Dr Spock father'. But his first wife disagrees and his second wife, although believing him innocent, describes his children's childhood as very difficult. His daughters say they had a significantly unhappy childhood.In the autumn of 1991, his middle daughter invited him to her home to confront him with the story of her childhood. She was supported by a friend and he was invited to listen and then leave. She told him that he had abused her throughout her youth. Scotford, however, said that the daughter went to a homeopath for treatment for thrush/candida and then blamed the condition on him. He also said his daughter, who was in her twenties, had been upset during a recent trip to France to buy a property. He said he booked them into a hotel where they would share a room. This was not odd, he insisted, 'to me it was quite natural'. He told journalists and scholars the same story, in the same way, reciting the details of her allegations, drawing attention to her body and the details of what she said he had done to her. Some seemed to find the detail persuasive. Several found it spooky.p172-173
Beatrix Campbell
Trust your own reason and your own logic, not your own media!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Nowadays, it is true, we have mass media and expert propaganda to spread suspicion and fear. But the people I mean—and they form the great majority—are not suspicious and fearful, as many educated and more influential persons are. Propaganda has not made them accept the Bomb. We protesters, though we may have won over some of their sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, have not made them reject it. They remain profoundly, astonishingly, shockingly indifferent.
J.B. Priestley
I thought, 'There are a lot of poets who have the courage to look into the abyss, but there are very few who have the courage to look happiness in the face and write about it,' which is what I wanted to be able to do.
Kenneth Koch
I have loved enough women to know how to paint.If I had loved fewer, I would be an illustrator; if I had loved more, I would be a poet.
Sarah Ruhl
Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good.
Bertolt Brecht
You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in the head, darling. It’s only that.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
No child’s face is dirty even if it is muddy, because an innocent face has so much light that anything comes onto it becomes almost invisible!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Child! Turn your face to the light, to the science, to the reason, to the truth, to the peace! Child! Be modern, be compassionate, be individual, and be independent! Child! Don’t be the man of anyone or any system, don’t believe in any religious stories, and don’t ever be silent against any oppressor! Child, turn your face to the light and walk towards the light!
Mehmet Murat ildan
If you have taught your child how to walk when he is all alone, it means that you have taught him everything!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The most perfect magic for a child is the touch of a loving hand!
Mehmet Murat ildan
When you make a child happy, the best gift you will ever get will be the smile of that child!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I know what it is to be hungry, and it is very hard when one cannot even pretend it away. -Sara
Frances Hodgson Burnett
I am Envy, begotten of a chimney-sweeper and an oyster-wife. I cannot read, and therefore wish all books were burnt; I am lean with seeing others eat - O that there would come a famine through all the world, that all might die, and I live alone; then thou should'st see how fat I would be! But must thou sit and I stand? Come down, with a vengeance!
Christopher Marlowe
Strong jealousy in a beautiful love is the autumn in the middle of a hot summer!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Even jealousy is based on fantasies: a fantasy that someone else has what belongs to you.
Anna Deavere Smith
There are apparently two hypotheses about jealousy: that it is a product of civilization and that it is a basic instinct of animals.
Kōbō Abe
At this point, the jealousy that tortured me all my life commenced, and the force with which it came over me marked me forever. It became my true passion, utterly heedless of any attempts at convincing me or pointing out a better way.
Elias Canetti
That was the worst period of all: it is my profession to imagine, to think in images: fifty times through the day, and immediately I woke during the night, a curtain would rise and the play would begin: always the same play, Sarah making love, Sarah with X, doing the same things that we had done together, Sarah kissing in her own particular way, arching herself in the act of sex and uttering that cry like pain, Sarah in abandonment. I would take pills at night to make me sleep quickly, but I never found any pills that would keep me asleep till daylight.
Graham Greene
There are occasions when a woman, no matter how weak and impotent in character she may be in comparison with a man, will yet suddenly become not only harder than any man, but even harder than anything and everything in the world.
Nikolai Gogol
Because I believe there is nothing so self-destroying, and no emotion quite so despicable, as jealousy.
Daphne du Maurier
He who is jealous, is never jealous of what you see, with what is imagined is enough.
Jacinto Benavente
Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.
George Bernard Shaw
Trifles light as air are to the jealous confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ.
William Shakespeare
I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all.
Graham Greene
O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;It is the green-ey'd monster, which doth mockThe meat it feeds on. That cuckold lives in bliss,Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger:But O, what damnèd minutes tells he o'erWho dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves!(Act 3, scene 3, 165–171)
William Shakespeare
I said I was impressed, Martha. I'm beside myself with jealousy. What do you want me to do, throw up?
Edward Albee
If I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I would teach them should be to forswear thin potations and to addict themselves to sack.
William Shakespeare
His principles were out of date, but there was a good deal to be said for his prejudices.
Oscar Wilde
Sometimes principles must be quitted without blinking en eye to discover the new paths!
Mehmet Murat ildan
There are no principles; there are only events. There is no good and bad, there are only circumstances. The superior man espouses events and circumstances in order to guide them. If there were principles and fixed laws, nations would not change them as we change our shirts and a man can not be expected to be wiser than an entire nation.
Honoré de Balzac
On the whole, we treat the Devil shamefully, and the worse we treat Him the more He laughs at us.
Robertson Davies
Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.
Langston Hughes
When you loose your power to laugh, you loose your power to think straight.
Jerome Lawrence
Whenever we hear laughter, we sense the magic and the beauty of being existed!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Laughter's all the damned thing's fit for.
Henrik Ibsen
I quickly laugh at everything for fear of having to cry.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
Nothing brings on jealousy like laughter.
Françoise Sagan
The joke loses everything when the joker laughs himself.
Friedrich Schiller
It is good to think; but to think in a right way, that is great!
Mehmet Murat ildan
You see, insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops.
Joseph Kesselring
I cannot bear to associate with the ordinary run of people. I have to surround myself with individuals who for the most part are more than a trifle insane
Wallace Thurman
...[I]f I don't get going soon, the whole impetus may die---and if that happens, well, I really shall consider a long, restful plunge into insanity. Sometimes the abyss yawns very attractively.
Dodie Smith
He laughed a little, in an odd, nervous kind of way. "Because if I don't get going soon, the whole impetus may die--and if that happens, well, I really shall consider a long, restful plunge into insanity. Sometimes the abyss yawns very attractively.
Dodie Smith
Innocence is a kind of insanity
Graham Greene
No one can know the infinite importance of a tiny drop of water better than a thirsty bird or a little ant or a man of desert!
Mehmet Murat ildan
When skies above were not yet namedNor earth below pronounced by nameThere was water...
Carol K. Mack
When the water is very calm and very beautiful, it won’t take a long time that a thick head will throw a stone in it!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Appreciate water before you are thirsty! Appreciate all the good things before you need them!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Even if you enter the dirty water, stay neat like a white swan!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The buckets emptied quickly, and men from different squads took turns bringing water from the gully that lay towards the city, where, in the feeble shade of emaciated mulberries, a muddy stream lived out its last days in the diabolical heat.
Mikhail Bulgakov
What a great genius this water is! It has thousands of different beautiful faces: It is a rainbow, an ocean, a lake, an iceberg, a waterfall, a river, a drop, a fog… What a great genius this water is!
Mehmet Murat ildan
A field which feeds you, a river which gives you water are much holier than all other so-called holy places!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Trying to educate the dumb with a dumb teacher is nothing but washing the dirty clothes in a dirty water!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The sea is a desert of waves,A wilderness of water.
Langston Hughes