If I wanted to change the world, the last thing I would do is write a play.
Interpretation
Writing a play may seem insignificant in the larger context of making meaningful change.
In this quote, Tom Stoppard reflects on the idea that if one truly desires to affect change in the world, one might consider more impactful actions rather than artistic endeavors like writing a play. This highlights the tension between art and social activism, suggesting that tangible results often require a different approach than mere artistic expression.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of social activism, one might reference this quote to emphasize practical actions over artistic endeavors.
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there.
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.
Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.
Our generation has the ability and the responsibility to make our ever-more connected world a more hopeful, stable and peaceful place.
'Middle class' used to be synonymous with secure, with steady, with boring, because middle-class people were people who were pretty much safe from the time they first started work on through retirement and until their deaths. No longer.
We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
Everybody believes in innovation until they see it. Then they think, 'Oh, no; that'll never work. It's too different.'
Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have.
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