Noel Coward Quotes

Opera? Just what the world needs: more fat women screaming.

Seabeck is slow to change.

I mean the future has become old fashioned.

People are always talking about the old days. They say that the old movies were better, that the old actors were so great. But I don't think so. All I can say about the old days is that they have passed.

Opera is given so little attention in the national press.

Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.

One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend to hear it a second time.

Things ain't what they used to be and never were.

I love opera so much. I would never go back to doing it, but I love to listen - I'm grateful for it.

In my view, the operas of Carlisle Floyd will find a place in the permanent repertoire.

Tradition" is very often an excuse word for people who don't want to change.

Those who cling to the past won't give up without a fight.

Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one.

What is the argument on the other side? Only this, that no case has been found in which it has been done before. That argument does not appeal to me in the least. If we never do anything which has not been done before, we shall never get anywhere. The law will stand still whilst the rest of the world goes on; and that will be bad for both.

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone, you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone, you leave it to a torrent of change.

If you decide to work with the opera world, chances are there are going to be people who resist that.

We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of inertia and the irksomeness of action.

In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards.

Fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem. It is futile to want the old days back, but that doesn't mean one should ignore the lessons of the visitable past.

We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.

An Old World revolution is only a movement around a motionless center; it never breaks out of the circle. Firm in the center is belief in Authority.

I think some people are just very passionate that things remain the way they were when they were kids.

I love only extreme novelty or the things of the past.

There are houses whose souls have passed into the limbo of Time, leaving their bodies in the limbo of London. Such was not quite the condition of Timothy's on the Bayswater Road, for Timothy's soul still had one foot in Timothy Forsyte's body, and Smither kept the atmosphere unchanging, of camphor and port wine and house whose windows are only opened to air it twice a day.

I look upon England today as an old gentleman who is travelling with a great deal of baggage, trumpery which has accumulated fromlong housekeeping, which he has not the courage to burn.