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.
All beginnings are somewhat strange; but we must have patience, and little by little, we shall find things, which at first were obscure, becoming clearer.
There are no medium-sized trees in the deep forest. There are only the towering ones, whose canopy spreads across the sky. Below, in the gloom, there's light for nothing but mosses and ferns. But when a giant falls, leaving a little space ... then there's a race - between the trees on either side, who want to spread out, and the seedlings below, who race to grow up. Sometimes, you can make your own space.
As we come to know the seriousness of the situation, the war, the racism, the poverty in our world, we come to realize that things will not be changed simply by words or demonstrations. Rather, it's a question of living one's life in a drastically different way.
The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside.
I would like to make sure, first of all, that our women in the informal sector - I mean, these are the farmers and the traders; many of them are not educated, many of them lacking literacy - be able to give them better working conditions. And we've done a lot to be able to achieve that.
Keeping our eyes on journey's end is what we need - the place where we see at last the world that is greater than the world, the new creation that cannot be contained in present thought or social order or piety.
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