Quote

No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.

Tom Stoppard

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Tom Stoppard
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: July 3
Dramaturge
Film Director
Journalist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Zlin
Sir Tom Stoppard
Matter
Things
Imperfect
Presses
Press
Free
Everything
Without

More quotes by Tom Stoppard

Image
It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.
Tom Stoppard
Image
The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.
Tom Stoppard
Image
Act first! The ideas will follow, and if not - well, it's progress
Tom Stoppard
Image
Real data is messy. ...It's all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it's playing your song, but unfortunately it's out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk- I mean, the noise! Impossible!
Tom Stoppard
Image
We must be born with an intuition of mortality.
Tom Stoppard
Image
Public postures have the configuration of private derangement.
Tom Stoppard
Image
I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Endlessly.
Tom Stoppard
Image
Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway. Guildenstern: What? Rosencrantz: England. Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?
Tom Stoppard
Image
If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that. But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.
Tom Stoppard
Image
Good things, when short, are twice as good.
Tom Stoppard
Image
I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.
Tom Stoppard
Image
My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.
Tom Stoppard
Image
It takes character to withstand the rigours of indolence.
Tom Stoppard
Image
Rosencrantz: Shouldn't we be doing something--constructive? Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? ... A short, blunt human pyramid...?
Tom Stoppard
Image
The results of the divorce between truth and human beings can be most graphically observed in politics.
Tom Stoppard
Image
The causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about, which depend on causes we know absolutely nothing about.
Tom Stoppard
Image
I know the British press is very attached to the lobby system. It lets the journalists and the politicians feel proud of their traditional freedoms while giving the reader as much of the truth as they think is good for him.
Tom Stoppard
Image
Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.
Tom Stoppard
Image
If rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!
Tom Stoppard
Image
I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.
Tom Stoppard