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Left to themselves people are noble, generous, uncorrupted, they'd create a completely new kind of society if only people weren't so blind, stupid and selfish.

Tom Stoppard

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Tom Stoppard
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: July 3
Dramaturge
Film Director
Journalist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Zlin
Sir Tom Stoppard
Stupid
Create
Uncorrupted
Society
Weren
Left
Generous
Kind
Selfish
People
Noble
Blind
Completely

More quotes by Tom Stoppard

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It's not the voting that's democracy it's the counting.
Tom Stoppard
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Between just desserts and tragic irony we are given quite a lot of scope for our particular talent. Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have got about as bad as they reasonably get.
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I don't write at the library, because I smoke when I work or would like the possibility of a smoke. Also, I need to be at my own desk.
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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.
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I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has never been in a play. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture.
Tom Stoppard
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It would have been nice to have had unicorns.
Tom Stoppard
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Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn't death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees but it doesn't bring death home to anyone- it doesn't catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says- 'One day you are going to die.
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I've seldom minded other people's opinions, but the other side of that coin is that I've seldom been interested by them, um their opinions about me I mean.
Tom Stoppard
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Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light.
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No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.
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The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.
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You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?
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For a long time I managed to think two things simultaneously, that I am actually a good playwright, and that the next time I write a play I will be revealed as someone who is no good at all.
Tom Stoppard
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Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last.
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Personally I am in favour of education but a university is not the place for it.
Tom Stoppard
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It takes character to withstand the rigours of indolence.
Tom Stoppard
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Writing a play is like smashing that [glass] ashtray, filming it in slow motion, and then running the film in reverse, so that the fragments of rubble appear to fly together. You start - or at least I start - with the rubble.
Tom Stoppard
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When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?
Tom Stoppard
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The results of the divorce between truth and human beings can be most graphically observed in politics.
Tom Stoppard
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If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.
Tom Stoppard