There's something scary about stupidity made coherent.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that when foolish ideas are presented in a logical manner, they can be particularly dangerous.
Tom Stoppard's quote highlights the unsettling nature of irrational ideas that are articulated in a clear and logical way. It implies that when stupidity is framed convincingly, it can mislead people and lead to harmful consequences, as coherent arguments may lend undue credibility to illogical or ignorant viewpoints.
In practice
In a debate about politics, one could use this quote to emphasize the risk of believing persuasive yet irrational arguments.
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.
Man is able to do what he is unable to imagine. His head trails a wake through the galaxy of the absurd.
As far as I'm concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.
People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings.
Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Every one had teeth and claws.
We don’t attach to things; we attach to our stories about them.
[Slavery] is a weed that grows in every soil.
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