A Quote by John Mortimer

Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.

John Mortimer

Quote Topics

Farce Minute Per Played Revolutions Thousand Tragedy

Quote Author

John Mortimer
English - Writer
April 21, 1923 - January 16, 2009

As Karl Marx once noted: 'Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial was a tragedy. The creationists and intelligent design theorists are a farce.

Michael Shermer

The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.

H. L. Mencken

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

David Gemmell

I type 40 words per minute on a normal computer with my left foot. And with two cups of coffee, I can do 53 words per minute.

Nick Vujicic

When steam first began to pump and wheels go round at so many revolutions per minute, what are called business habits were intended to make the life of man run in harmony with the steam engine, and his movement rival the train in punctuality.

George William Russell

I type 90 words per minute on the typewriter; I type 100 words per minute on the word processor. But, of course, I don't keep that up indefinitely - every once in a while I do have to think a few seconds.

Isaac Asimov

I've played farce on the stage, but I have never played any sort of comedy on the screen.

Peter O'Toole

There's comedy in tragedy, and tragedy in comedy. There's always light and dark in most jobs. Whether it's framed as a comedy, drama or tragedy, you try to mix it up within that. You can work on a comedy and it's not laugh-a-minute off set. You can work on a tragedy that's absolutely hilarious.

Harry Treadaway

Nowhere in the world, in no act of genocide, in no war, are so many people killed per minute, per hour and per day as those who are killed by hunger and poverty on our planet.

Fidel Castro

Farce is nearer tragedy in its essence than comedy is.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

History repeats itself, the first as tragedy, then as farce.

Karl Marx

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

Karl Marx

The word 'revolution' first brings to mind violent upheavals in the state, but ideas of revolution in science, and of political revolution, are almost coeval. The word once meant only a revolving, a circular return to an origin, as when we speak of revolutions per minute or the revolution of the planets about the sun.

Ian Hacking

Dinner at the Huntercombes' possessed only two dramatic features - the wine was a farce and the food a tragedy.

Anthony Powell

It is probably fair to estimate the frequency of a majority of mutations, in higher organisms, between one in ten thousand and one in a million per gene per generation.