Farce Quotes - Page 3

• The myriad-minded man, our, and all men's, Shakespeare, has in this piece presented us with a legitimate farce in exactest consonance with the philosophical principles and character of farce, as distinguished from comedy and from entertainments. A proper farce is mainly distinguished from comedy by the licence allowed, and even required, in the fable, in order to produce strange and laughable situations. The story need not be probable, it is enough that it is possible.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Philosophical, Character, Men

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2015). “Shakespeare, With Introductory Matter on Poetry, The Drama, and The Stage by S.T. Coleridge: Coleridge’s Essays and Lectures on Shakespeare and Other Old Poets and Dramatists”, p.61, e-artnow

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• On the stage . . . masks are assumed with some regard to procedure; in everyday life, the participants act their parts without consideration either for suitability of scene or for the words spoken by the rest of the cast: the result is a general tendency for things to be brought to the level of farce even when the theme is serious enough.

  Anthony Powell

  Life, Everyday, Levels

  Anthony Powell (2010). “A Question of Upbringing: Book 1 of A Dance to the Music of Time”, p.51, University of Chicago Press

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• To glorify democracy and to silence the people is a farce; to discourse on humanism and to negate people is a lie.

  Paulo Freire

  Lying, People, Silence

  Paulo Freire (2014). “Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition”, p.91, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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• O human creature,you are the investigator without knowledge, the magistrate without jurisdiction, and all in all, the fool of the farce.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Arrogance, Fool, Human Nature

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• Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!

  Ivan Turgenev

  Lying, Thinking, Blood

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• Reforms in Russia are very tragic, but they always end in a farce.

  Oscar Wilde

  Russia, Reform, Ends

  Oscar Wilde (2014). “Wilde Complete Plays: Lady Windermere's Fan; An Ideal Husband; The Importance of Being Earnest; A Woman of No Importance; Salome; The Duchess of Padua; Vera, or the Nihilists; A Florentine Tragedy; La Sainte Courtisane”, p.570, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• I would love, more than anything, to do an out-and-out farce with huge physical energy. Just because you're from the minimalist school, it doesn't mean you can't go big.

  Aidan Quinn

  School, Mean, Energy

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that's too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.

  Julian Barnes

  Tragedy, Doe, Sandwiches

  Julian Barnes (2010). “A History Of The World In 10 1/2 Chapters”, p.241, Random House

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• Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Passion, Reality, Men

  "A Short History of Decay". Book by Emile M. Cioran, 1949.

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• These are the only genuine ideas, the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Ideas, Genuine, Rhetoric

  "The Revolt of the Masses". Book by José Ortega y Gasset, p. 157, 1929.

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• It's all a farce, - these tales they tell About the breezes sighing, And moans astir o'er field and dell, Because the year is dying.

  Paul Laurence Dunbar

  Years, Dying, Fields

  PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR (1913). “THE COMPLETE POEMS OF PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR”, p.94, Lulu.com

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• Voting, the be all and end all of modern democratic politicians, has become a farce, if indeed it was ever anything else. By voting, the people decide only which of the oligarchs preselected for them as viable candidates will wield the whip used to flog them and will command the legion of willing accomplices and anointed lickspittles who perpetrate the countless violations of the people's natural rights. Meanwhile, the masters soothe the masses by assuring them night and day that they - the plundered and bullied multitudes who compose the electorate - are themselves the government.

  Robert Higgs

  Night, Government, Rights

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• In the best farce today we start with some absurd premise as to character or situation, but if the premises be once granted we move logically enough to the ending.

  George P. Baker

  Moving, Character, Today

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• Party politics is now a real farce.

  George Sand

  Real, Party, Politics

  George Sand (2009). “Letters of George Sand”, p.325, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Praying that does not result in right thinking and right living is a farce. We have missed the whole office of prayer if it fails to purge our character and correct conduct. We have failed entirely to understand the virtue of prayer, if it does not bring about the revolutionizing of life. In the very nature of tings, we must either quit praying or quit our bad conduct.

  Edward McKendree Bounds

  Prayer, Character, Thinking

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• A farce is that in poetry which grotesque (caricature) is in painting. The persons and actions of a farce are all unnatural, and the manners false, that is, inconsistent with the characters of mankind; and grotesque painting is the just resemblance of this.

  John Dryden

  Character, Action, Painting

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• Life is a farce, and should not end with a mourning scene.

  Horace Walpole

  Mourning, Life Is, Scene

  Horace Walpole, Peter Cunningham (1858). “The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Oxford”, p.452

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• As so often, a political event involving Donald Trump looks like swinging wildly between melodrama and farce. The Republican National Convention in Cleveland has begun with accusations of plagiarism after Mr Trump's wife Melania gave a speech dotted with sentences that appeared to have been lifted from a speech that Michelle Obama gave in 2008.

  Mark Colvin

  Wife, Political, Speech

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• So on the Tuesday night deadline, while Abu Qatada was appealing to European Court judges, the Home Secretary, who thought the deadline was Monday night, was partying with "X Factor" judges. When the Home Secretary is accused of not knowing what day of the week it is, confusion and chaos have turned into farce.

  Yvette Cooper

  Monday, Party, Home

  Yvette Cooper during House of Commons Debates, www.publications.parliament.uk. April 19, 2012.

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• Freedom of worship, even of public speech, would become a farce if interference became the order of the day.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Freedom, Order, Speech

  Mahatma Gandhi (1983). “Collected Works”

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• People don't write about kids; you have to give them a lot of freedom, and that causes anarchy and that causes farce.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Writing, Kids, People

  "Michael Ondaatje, Among Thieves". Interview with Maddie Oatman, www.motherjones.com. September/October 2011.

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• Keep in mind that the Iraqis are not telling us anything we don't already know or can't prove. This is what makes this whole inspection process and all the rigmarole surrounding it a total farce.

  Rush Limbaugh

  War, Mind, Process

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• If melodrama is the quintessence of drama, farce is the quintessence of theatre. Melodrama is written. A moving image of the worldis provided by a writer. Farce is acted. The writer's contribution seems not only absorbed but translated.... One cannot imagine melodrama being improvised. The improvised drama was pre-eminently farce.

  Eric Bentley

  Drama, Moving, Theatre

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• A hilarious academic novel that'll send you laughing (albeit ruefully) back into the trenches of the classroom. . . . [A] mordant minor masterpiece. . . . Like the best works of farce, academic or otherwise, Dear Committee Members deftly mixes comedy with social criticism and righteous outrage. By the end, you may well find yourself laughing so hard it hurts.

  Maureen Corrigan

  Hurt, Laughing So Hard, Finding Yourself

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• The difference between farce and humour in literature is, I suppose, that farce strums louder and louder on one string, while humour varies its note, changes its key, grows and spreads and deepens until it may indeed reach tragic depths.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Funny, Humor, Keys

  V.S. Pritchett (2011). “In My Good Books”, p.42, A&C Black

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