theatre-critics

"Athens gave Birth and Perfection to the Art, and seems, like the true Mother, to have been most fond of it, and therefore gave its professors the greatest Encouragement. The Value that Government had for both is evident from these two Instances: Sophocles, as a Reward of his Antigone, had the Government of the City and Island of Samos confer'd upon him: And on the Death of Eupolis in a Sea-Fight, there was a Law publish'd, that no Poet for the Future shou'd go to the Wars; so great a Loss they thought the Death of one Poet to the Commonwealth."

"The United States, I believe, are under the impression that they are twenty years in advance of this country; whilst, as a matter of actual verifiable fact, of course, they are just about six hours behind it."

"It would be unfair to suggest that one of the most characteristic sounds of the English Sunday is the sound of Harold Hobson barking up the wrong tree."

"Na to mamy cztery ściany i sufit, aby brudy swoje prać w domu i aby nikt o nich nie wiedział."

"Bo zgodziłam się z życiem i kradnę to, co jest najmilszego. To jest szczyt mądrości."

"Śmierć na wszystko pomoże."

"Skromność – skarb dziewczęcia."

": Niby to u nas nie ma kokot w kamienicy. Sama mamcia wynajmowała tej z pierwszego piętra. (z godnością): Ale się jej nie kłaniam. : Ale pieniążki za czynsz mamcia bierze od niej, że aż ha... : Przepraszam, ja takich pieniędzy dla siebie nie biorę. : A co mamcia z nimi robi? (majestatycznie): Podatki nimi płacę."

"Oj, czasy! czasy nastały. Ani paszy dla bydła, ani uczciwości ludzkiej."

"Dla kobiety nie ma, jak dom."

"A przestań się malować, bo wyglądasz jak kamienica odnowiona na przyjazd cesarza."

"Każdy samobójca musi być szalony i stracić poczucie moralności i wiary w obecność Boga."

"Kobieta powinna przejść przez życie cicho i spokojnie."

"Każda kobieta to fortepian – tylko trzeba umieć grać."

"A niech was wszyscy diabli!!!"

"Gdzie widziałaś uczciwą kobietę z rudymi włosami?"

"Dla męża, mój panie, kobieta się nie potrzebuje pod spodem stroić."

"Wielka afera – zagoi się do wesela."

"W porządnej kamienicy wypadki się nie trafiają."

"Ja tam nie mam czasu myśleć."

"Moje sumienie jest czyste i nie boję się dnia białego."

"Jeden Judasz drugiego za pieniądze sprzedaje."

"It was Forster who suggested that should die. Dickens took this and ran with it — he thought it was brilliant."

"... It is the fact that teaches, and not any sermonizing drawn from it. Oliver Twist is the history of a child born in a and brought up by overseers, and there is nothing introduced that is out of keeping with the design."

"By 1831, when Forster was 18 and Lamb 55, they had met and become friends. Lamb was then living in retirement at as a distinguished literary man. Like Leigh Hunt he would have attracted Forster because of his links with the recent and glamorous past, for Lamb had known the young Wordsworth, had known Southey and Hazlitt; Coleridge had been his 'fifty years old friend without a dissension'. ... He was a fine critic and a great essayist. His sister was a lunatic and he himself a saddened, garrulous, humorous, and gregarious bachelor who often drank too much. Drinking and gregarious gossiping suited the young Forster, and Forster suited Lamb, who treated him with a mixture of patronage, affection and reliance."

"... No one conversant with can have failed to be struck by the extraordinary lawlessness that prevailed at sea. The coasts for the most part were without watch or defence. The dissolute extravagance of the court took no heed of the subject's claim to protection; and if a needy lord could fill his spendthrift purse for a day by help of a maritime freebooter, the honest merchant was helpless against the plunderer and pirate. As a consequence, the coasts swarmed with such; but of all who had so obtained infamous distinction, the most notorious was Captain . This man had possessed himself of several pirate ships,and no point along the Irish or western sea was safe from his attacks."

", whose life and adventures should be known to all who know his writings, must be held to have succeeded in nothing that his friends would have had him succeed in. He was intended for a clergyman, and was rejected when he applied for orders; he practiced as a physician, and never made what would have paid for a degree; what he was not asked or expected to do, was to write, but he wrote and paid the penalty. His existence was a continued privation. The days were few, in which he had resources for the night, or dared to look forward to the morrow."

"So much has been said by Forster himself in the Life about the dramatic performances in aid of the comparatively short-lived , that to do more than touch upon it here would be superfluous. Of course its real founder was Dickens himself, seconded, though I fancy with not quite so much enthusiasm, by , Forster, Mr. (afterwards Sir) , , , , and many others in the world of Literature and Art."

"... If to owe nothing to other men is to be original, a more original man than Swift never lived; but, with the wonderful subtlety of thought so rarely joined to the same robustness of intellect which placed his wit and philosophy on the level of Rabelais, he had the same habit as the great Frenchman of turning things inside out, and putting away decencies as if they were shows or hypocrisies. In both it led to an insufferable coarseness."

"has never been a spiritual home to me; but let me add that I have not got one, although at Cambridge for a few years I fancied that I had. 'Bloomsbury' had been to me, rather, what those who cater for sailors (like their, my home is a floating one) call 'a home from home'. Looking back I see that I converged upon 'Bloomsbury' by three ways: through making friends with , through getting to know some junior to me, and through my introduction into the home-life of and ."

"... the has to tell his story entirely in the present tense. We must allow him a certain license in foreshortening changes in human beings which in order to be true to life require the passage of time."

"Judged by the influence upon men's minds alone, the writings which Leslie Stephen collected in Essays on Free-thinking and Plain-speaking (1873), and in An Agnostic's Apology (1893) (most of the latter written much earlier), must be considered the most important part of his life's work. One reason why, as we shall be presently reminded, he wrote disparagingly of literary criticism, was that it seemed so trivial compared with criticism of thought and religion. What if he had induced some readers to take a clearer view of the merits and limitations of Fielding or De Quincey, or if he had succeeded in giving a tolerably true account of some man's life? Of what importance was that compared with helping men to a truer conception of the nature of things, or with the work of a man of science?"

"Many changes within human beings, such as offer the most interesting themes, are inevitably hidden and silent, or too gradual for drama. 'To penetrate deeply into the human consciousness is the glory of the philosopher, the moralist, the , and, to a certain degree, even of the lyric poet', but the capacity to do so is not enough to make a dramatist."

"As every reader of novels knows, if once the novelist has made his heroine speak rightly he can spare a description of her beauty; if he can transmit the emotion of the moment he need only say the sun was up, for his figures to stand in the glances of the morning and the birds to begin to sing in the woods: it is the same with acting and stage properties. may drink to the health of her assembling guests from a gilded marmalade pot, if only she raises it properly to her lips, with as much effect as if she drank from a cup copied from a museum treasure."

"In Berlin the situation is serious but not desperate; in Vienna, the situation is desperate but not serious."

"Ironic, when you bear in mind that the free enterprise system has lifted over a billion people out of extreme poverty since 1990, while Maduro has urged starving Venezuelans to start cooking their rabbits. That's been the story of nearly every socialist utopian project, which we would do well to remember on this May Bank Holiday: it begins with a vision of the brotherhood of man and ends with people eating their pets."

"My proposal is this: once this technology [genetically engineered intelligence] becomes available, why not offer it free of charge to parents on low incomes with below-average IQs? Provided there is sufficient take-up, it could help to address the problem of flat-lining inter-generational social mobility and serve as a counterweight to the tendency for the meritocratic elite to become a hereditary elite. It might make all the difference when it comes to the long-term sustainability of advanced meritocratic societies."

"It wasn't my proudest moment. I asked who a particular MP [was] who one couldn't see the head of, but was sitting behind Ed Miliband and wearing an extremely low-cut dress… I committed the sin of noticing it and apparently this constitutes harassment in some people's views."

"I'm neither misogynistic nor homophobic. I'm a strong supporter of both women's rights and LGBT rights."

"It was as if all the meritocratic fantasies of every 1960s educationalist had come true and all Harold Wilson’s children had been let in at the gate … Small, vaguely deformed undergraduates would scuttle across the quad as if carrying mobile homes on their backs. Replete with acne and anoraks, they would peer up through thick pebble-glasses, pausing only to blow their noses."

"Inclusive. It’s one of those ghastly, politically correct words that have survived the demise of New Labour. Schools have got to be 'inclusive' these days. That means wheelchair ramps, the complete works of Alice Walker in the school library (though no Mark Twain) and a Special Educational Needs Department that can cope with everything from dyslexia to Münchausen syndrome by proxy. If [then education secretary, [[Michael Gove|[Michael] Gove]] is serious about wanting to bring back O-levels, the government will have to repeal the Equalities Act because any exam that isn't 'accessible' to a functionally illiterate troglodyte with a mental age of six will be judged to be 'elitist' and therefore forbidden by Harman’s Law."

"Men learned to speak in order to understand one another. Cultural languages have lost the ability to help men to advance beyond the most rudimentary level and attain understanding. It seems that the time has come to learn to be silent once again."

"Outside a million windows, a million birds had sung as morning swept around the globe. Few men and few women were so glad that a new day had dawned as these birds seem to be.... We are likely to awake with an "Oh, dear!" on our lips; they with a "What fun!" in their beaks.""

"When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him Vandal. When he wantonly destroys one of the works of God we call him Sportsman."

"In New England the struggle for existence is visibly the struggle of plant with plant, each battling his neighbor for sunlight and for the spot of ground which, so far as moisture and nourishment are concerned, would support them all. Here, the contest is not so much of plant against plant as of plant against inanimate nature. The limiting factor is not the neighbor but water; and I wonder if that is, perhaps, one of the things which make makes this country seem to enjoy a kind of peace one does not find elsewhere."

"As to the black dwarfs, they wouldn’t allow anyone to look into them, because what is inside them is truly horrible. That is why they want everything on Earth to be as black and dark as they are themselves."

"We are all asleep in the glass coffin."

"Your earthly body is after all nothing more than a dress and inside it is a finer dress, and you yourself are in this finer dress."

"[The] kind of thinking [...] which refuses to make distinctions among artists on the basis of color or nationality or gender, which insists on inclusion rather than exclusion, is hardly fashionable with the current tribalism known as multiculturalism and cultural diversity. But it represents [...] the only kind of thinking that can prepare the way for great art, and builds the path to a reconciled society."

"Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw’s prefaces."