Stephen Fry Quotes (93 quotes, page 2) | Quotes of famous people

“There’s nothing worse than the British in one of their fits of morality.”

Stephen Fry

On the expenses scandal in the UK.
Quoted in Pink News http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/articles/2005-12560.html
This is a variation on a line from Lord Macaulay's 'On Moore's Life of Lord Byron' (1830): 'We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.'
2000s

“I used many times to touch my own chest and feel, under its asthmatic quiver, the engine of the heart and lungs and blood and feel amazed at what I sensed was the enormity of the power I possessed. Not magical power, but real power. The power simply to go on, the power to endure, that is power enough, but I felt I had also the power to create, to add, to delight, to amaze and to transform.”

Stephen Fry

1990s, Moab is My Washpot (autobiography, 1997)

Feeling , Sense , Time , Heart

“My vocal cords are made of tweed. I give off an air of Oxford donnishness and old BBC wirelesses.”

Stephen Fry

1990s, Moab is My Washpot (autobiography, 1997)

“If I had a large amount of money I should certainly found a hospital for those whose grip upon the world is so tenuous that they can be severely offended by words and phrases and yet remain all unoffended by the injustice, violence and oppression that howls daily about our ears.”

Stephen Fry

"Trefusis on Any Questions" in Paperweight (1993) p. 61.
Originally broadcast on Loose Ends, BBC Radio 4, circa 1987.
1990s

Money , World

“You cannot work too hard at poetry. People are bad at it not because they have tin ears, but because they simply don't have the faintest idea how much work goes into it. It's not as if you're ordering a pizza or doing something that requires direct communication in a very banal way. But it seems these days the only people who spend time over things are retired people and prisoners. We bolt things, untasted. It's so easy to say, 'That'll do.' Everyone's in a hurry. People are intellectually lazy, morally lazy, ethically lazy… All the time. When people get angry with a traffic warden they don't stop and think what it would be like to be a traffic warden or how annoying it would be if people could park wherever they liked. People talk lazily about how hypocritical politicians are. But everyone is. On the one hand we hate that petrol is expensive and on the other we go on about global warming. We abrogate the responsibility for thought and moral decisions onto others and then have the luxury of saying it's not good enough.”

Stephen Fry

Interview with The Daily Telegraph promoting his book The Ode Less Travelled. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3647424/The-would-be-don.html
2000s

Hate , People , Way , Communication

“Pathetic, naive, like small noisy tantrums.”

Stephen Fry

On the e-book Poets Against the War.
Interview with The Daily Telegraph promoting his book The Ode Less Travelled. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3647424/The-would-be-don.html
2000s

“I have to mime at parties when everyone sings Happy Birthday... mime or mumble and rumble and growl and grunt so deep that only moles, manta rays and mushrooms can hear me.”

Stephen Fry

on his frustrating inability to sing
1990s, Moab is My Washpot (autobiography, 1997)

Birthday , Singing , Happiness

“A cut glass English accent can fool unsuspecting Americans into detecting a brilliance that isn't there.”

Stephen Fry

2010s

Fools

“I don't need you to remind me of my age, I have a bladder to do that for me.”

Stephen Fry

"Trefusis Returns!" in Paperweight (1993) p. 279.
Originally printed in The Daily Telegraph circa 1990.
1990s

Age

“The beauty of the brain is that you can still be as greedy as you like for knowledge and it doesn’t show.”

Stephen Fry

Radio Times interview (2013)
1990s

Beauty , Knowledge

“I actually got a Ugandan Minister to say, on camera— he's the Minister of Ethics and Integrity, it's the only such ministry in the world— and I said to him, "Look, even if these three utterly false supports on which you base your homophobia are true, which they aren't, there's so much more to worry about in your country than the odd gay person going to bed with the other gay person. For example, you have almost an epidemic of child rape in this country, which is just frightening."
And he said, "Ah, but it is the right kind of child rape."
I said, "That was on camera. Do you know that was on camera?"
He said, "Yes."
I said, "Can you just explain what you meant?"
"Well, it is men raping girls. Which is natural."”

Stephen Fry

The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson,
Recounting an exchange with Ugandan Minister Simon Lokodo.
2010s

Men , World , Girl , Support

“I genuinely believe that the Catholic church is not, to put it at its mildest, a force for good in the world… We certainly don’t need the stigmatisation, the victimisation that leads to the playground bullying when people say: “You’re a disordered, morally evil individual.””

Stephen Fry

That’s not nice, it isn’t nice.
"The Catholic church is a force for good in the world", November 7th 2009, Abridged Intelligence² debate speech.
2000s

People , World , Evil

“Alternative medicine people call themselves "holistic" and say it's the "whole" approach. Well, if it's the whole approach, let it be the mind as well. Use logic, use sense, use the incredible five wits you were given by creation.”

Stephen Fry

Room 101, Season 6 Episode 10
2000s

People , Sense

“What decent person would want to spend a life picking and cavilling? Picture this scene. A critic arrives at the gates of heaven. 'And what did you do?' asks Saint Peter. 'Well', says the dead soul. 'I criticised things'. 'I beg your pardon?' 'You know, other people wrote things, performed things, painted things and I said stuff like, "thin and unconvincing", "turgid and uninspired", "competent and serviceable,"… you know'.”

Stephen Fry book Paperweight

On critics, from "Paperweight", 2006. <sup> http://wongablog.co.uk/2006/07/14/stephen-fry-on-critics/</sup>
2000s

Life , People , Soul , Painting

“LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives access to every one of these essences of existence, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry 'Wow!”

Stephen Fry

all the time, which is one of LSD's most distressing and least endearing side-effects.
1990s, Moab is My Washpot (autobiography, 1997)

Music , Water , Time , Cry

“Wit can be beautiful, because it expresses and distils an idea.”

Stephen Fry

On the subject of criteria he used to judge in The Most Beautiful Tweet contest, Hay Festival 2010[citation needed]
2010s

Beauty , Idea

“Aquinas and Augustus of Hippo, both proposed this extraordinary idea that babies who were unbaptised would not know heaven. They also proposed the idea of purgatory which doesn’t exist in The Bible. There’s absolutely no evidence for it. However, what an extraordinary brilliant coup to imagine such a thing as purgatory. That a soul needs to be prayed for, in order to go to heaven. In order to turn left when he enters the aeroplane of heaven and get a first class seat. That, he needs to be prayed for. And many hundreds, indeed over a thousand years, you’ll be amazed what generous terms those prayers came at. Sometimes as little as two thirds of a year’s salary. Could ensure that a dead loved one would go to heaven. And money could ensure that your baby. Your dead child, your dead uncle, your dead mother, could go to heaven. And if you were rich enough, you could have a chantry built and monks would permanently sing prayers so that that existence in heaven for the child would go up and up and up until they were at the table of the Lord themselves.”

Stephen Fry

2010s, Intelligence Squared, 2014

Love , Money , Soul , Imagination

“Dacre is, all those who have had the misfortune to work for him assure me, just about as loathsome, self-regarding, morally putrid, vengeful and disgusting a man as it possible to be.”

Stephen Fry

The Daily Mail and Lord Dacre appeasing again http://stephen-fry-me.tumblr.com/post/57805910021/the-daily-mail-and-lord-dacre-appeasing-again, 2013 blog post.
2000s

“All the cold-reading clairvoyants and the nonsensical astrologers and absurd ESP merchants and other such people who talk about vibrations and energies…. God, if there’s a word that drives me mad it’s “energy” used in a nonsensical way—don’t get me started!”

Stephen Fry

" Last Chance to Think http://www.csicop.org/si/show/stephen_fry--last_chance_to_think/" Interview (2010) by Kylie Sturgess in Skeptical Inquirer. Vol 34 (1)
2000s

God , People , Way , Reading

“It is, I know, for I have experienced it perhaps twice in my life, an awful privilege to be too much loved and perhaps the kindest thing I ever did in my life was never to let Matthew know to what degree he had destroyed my peace and my happiness.”

Stephen Fry

1990s, Moab is My Washpot (autobiography, 1997)

Love , Life , Peace , Happiness

“On the subject of biblical texts and examples to why you can't do certain things with your body that you wish to, I find that absolutely absurd. I've always been extremely uncomfortable with the idea in any society that the belief is based on revealed truth, that's to say on a text like a Bible or a Qur'an, or whatever it is. It seems to me that the greatness of our culture, for all its incredible faults, is that we have grown up on the Greek ideal of discovering the truth, discovering by looking around us, by empirical experiment, by the combination of the experience of generations of ancestors who have contributed to our sum knowledge of the way the world works, and so on. And to have that snatched away and to be told what to think by a book, however great it may be in places, this is a book that says you can sell your daughter into slavery, it's a book that bans menstruating women from within miles of temples. The fact that it also says that for one man to lie with another man is an abomination, is no more made relevant or important than the fact that you can't eat shellfish.”

Stephen Fry

Interview with Simon Callow.[citation needed]
2000s

Women , Truth , Lie , Books

“Because the god who created this universe, if it was created by a god, is quite clearly a maniac, an utter maniac, totally selfish. We have to spend our life on our knees thanking him? What kind of god would do that?”

Stephen Fry

2010s, On what he would say to God were he to meet him, February 2015