Farce Quotes - Page 4

• I actually had a chance to be in Delta Farce, but I couldn't do it because I read the script.

  Jeff Foxworthy

  Scripts, Chance, Delta

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• Mum did a lot of commercial theatre and farces in the 1980s and '90s to make sure the school bills were paid.

  Benedict Cumberbatch

  School, Theatre, Bills

  "Why do women go nuts for me? Benedict Cumberbatch on his weird life as a sex symbol" by John Hiscock, www.mirror.co.uk. June 13, 2012.

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• I knew nothing about farce until I read Puce a l'Oreille, and had no idea what a deadly serious business it is.

  John Mortimer

  Funny, Humor, Ideas

  John Mortimer (2010). “CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE”, p.241, Penguin UK

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• I often need a limited space. It's like having a house to roam around in and reinvent and have things to happen in, kind of like a French farce. Doors opening, doors closing, new people arriving, and disappearing, and so forth.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Doors, Space, People

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• Art, not less eloquently than literature, teaches her children to venerate the single eye. Remember Matsys. His representations of miser-life are breathing. A forfeited bond twinkles in the hard smile. But follow him to an altar-piece. His Apostle has caught a stray tint from his usurer. Features of exquisite beauty are seen and loved; but the old nature of avarice frets under the glow of devotion. Pathos staggers on the edge of farce.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Art, Children, Eye

  Robert Aris WILLMOTT (1851). “Pleasures,objects and advantages of literature”, p.46

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• We devote the activity of our youth to revelry and the decrepitude of our old age to repentance: and we finish the farce by bequeathing our dead bodies to the chancel, which when living, we interdicted from the church.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Age, Church, Body

  Charles Caleb Colton (1866). “Lacon: or, Many things in few words”, p.343

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• [Vathek] has, in parts, been called, but to some judgments, never is, dull: it is certainly in parts, grotesque, extravagant and even nasty. But Beckford could plead sufficient "local colour" for it, and a contrast, again almost Shakespearean, between the flickering farce atrocities of the beginning and the sombre magnificence of the end. Beckford's claims, in fact, rest on the half-score or even half-dozen pages towards the end: but these pages are hard to parallel in the later literature of prose fiction.

  William Thomas Beckford

  Fiction, Half, Literature

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• And this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Life, Loneliness, Simple

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• People who object to weapons aren't abolishing violence, they're begging for rule by brute force, when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically 'right.' Guns ended that, and social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work.

  L. Neil Smith

  Men, Animal, Gun

  L. Neil Smith (2001). “The Probability Broach”, p.121, Macmillan

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• It is. But not as hard as farce.

  Edmund Gwenn

  Last Words, Hard

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• The biggest farce of man's history has been the argument that wars are fought to save civilization.

  Charles E. McKenzie

  War, Men, Civilization

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• The EU report speaks for itself. The statement in my view shows that the mission has turned out to be something worse than a farce, ... We shall in the coming days and weeks see what we can do to expose the pack of lies and innuendoes that characterise the garbage in this report.

  Meles Zenawi

  Lying, Views, Garbage

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• Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.

  Henry James, Sr.

  Spiritual, Flower, Night

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• Today our (Society of Jesus) prime educational objective must be to form men (and women) for others; men (and women) who will live not for themselves but for God and his Christ - for the God-man who lived and died for all the world; men (and women) who cannot even conceive of love of God which does not include love for the least of their neighbors; men (and women) completely convinced that love of God which does not issue in justice for others is a farce.

  Pedro Arrupe

  Jesus, Educational, Men

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• One of the great problems of philosophy, is the relationship between the realm of knowledge and the realm of values. Knowledge is what is; values are what ought to be. I would say that all traditional philosophies up to and including Marxism have tried to derive the "ought" from the "is." My point of view is that this is impossible, this is a farce.

  Jacques Monod

  Philosophy, Knowledge, Science

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• It's a mistake to think that poor people get the benefit from the welfare system. It's a total fraud. Most welfare go to the rich of this country: the military-industrial complex, the bankers, the foreign dictators, it's totally out of control... This idea that the government has services or goods that they can pass on is a complete farce. Governments have nothing. They can't create anything, they never have. All they can do is steal from one group and give it to another at the destruction of the principles of freedom, and we ought to challenge that concept.

  Ron Paul

  Country, Military, Mistake

  Television interview, 1987.

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• Let's put it this way. I question whether 6 million Jews actually died in Nazi death camps. There are two major sources for Holocaust stories. One is the Nuremburg war-crimes trial, which has been shown by all honest historians to be a farce of justice. Another source is the great body of literature and media work, and at least 90% of that material is from biased Jewish sources.

  David Duke

  War, Media, Two

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• The reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life.

  Samuel Johnson

  Civility, Scene, Reciprocal

  Samuel Johnson, Sir John Hawkins (1787). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: The lives of the most eminent English poets, concluded. Miscellaneous lives”, p.585

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• Foolish: It's all foolish. Life is a farce a stupid, sickening farce played out by fools.

  David Gemmell

  Stupid, Fool, Life Is

  "The King Beyond the Gate". Book by David Gemmell, Ch. 16, 1985.

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• And Tragedy should blush as much to stoop To the low mimic follies of a farce, As a grave matron would to dance with girls.

  Horace

  Girl, Tragedy, Acting

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• Comedy speaks for civilization; farce bears an ill-concealed, sometimes unconcealed animus against civilization. Often against civility too.

  Irving Howe

  Civilization, Bears, Comedy

  Irving Howe (1995). “A Critic's Notebook”, Harvest Books

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• Comedy appeals to the collective mind of the audience and this grows fatigued; while farce appeals to a more robust organ, their collective belly.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Mind, Comedy, Robust

  W. Somerset Maugham (2010). “The Summing Up”, p.142, Random House

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• I am going to seek a great purpose, draw the curtain, the farce is played.

  Francois Rabelais

  Death, Nature, Purpose

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• I would not like to live in a world without cathedrals. I need their beauty and grandeur. I need their imperious silence. I need it against the witless bellowing of the barracks yard and the witty chatter of the yes-men. I want to hear the rustling of the organ, this deluge of ethereal notes. I need it against the shrill farce of marches.

  Pascal Mercier

  Witty, Men, Silence

  Pascal Mercier (2009). “Night Train To Lisbon”, p.85, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• The affectionate farce I make of him ignores the ways I feel his lack of love for me. But we are managing.

  Lorrie Moore

  Lack Of Love, Way, Affectionate

  Lorrie Moore (2012). “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital”, p.4, Vintage

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