Quotes by David Hare

“Smiles are the language of love.”

“Strength was the virtue of paganism; obedience is the virtue of Christianity.”

“The theatre is the best way of showing the gap between what is said and what is seen to be done, and that is why, ragged and gap-toothed as it is, it has still a far healthier potential than some poorer, abandoned arts.”

“Sudden resolutions, like the sudden rise of mercury in a barometer, indicate little else than the variability of the weather.”

“Purity is the feminine, truth the masculine of honor.”

“Weak minds sink under prosperity as well as adversity; but strong and deep ones have two high tides.”

“No one but a fool is always right.”

“When they speak, dead frogs fall out of their mouths.”

“Children always turn to the light.”

“The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.”

“The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.”

“It takes seventeen muscles to smile and forty-three muscles to frown”

“The little things are most worthwhile- quiet word, a look, a smile.”

The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.

We appealed to the conscience of the world. The world has no conscience. We have no one but ourselves.The fight. The struggle. The historic destiny. The return of the people. The cause: life therefore having a meaning and shape that eludes the rest of us in the endless wash of What the hell are we doing here? In a single day, says an Israeli friend, he experiences events and emotions that would keep a Swede going for a year.

People always say that in England we lead shallow lives. Our lives must be shallow because we live in a country where nobody believes in anything any more. My whole life, Ive been told: Western civilization? An old bitch gone in the teeth, And so people say, go to Israel. Because in Israel at least people are fighting. In Israel, theyre fighting for something they believe in.

Now it turns out that a few broadsheet film critics in Britain do indeed belong to a category of people who would have resisted Hitler when he came to power. So the great shame is, clearly film critics should have been running Austria at the time, because Hitler would have represented no problem to them at all. [The Guardians] Peter Bradshaw would have known exactly what to do, and he would not have been remotely fallible to any Nazi who threatened his life. No, he would have died in heroic acts of individual resistance. So its a privilege to live among people who enjoy such moral certainty.

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.