Top 15 Athol Fugard Quotes

Hally: Not many intellectuals are prepared to shovel manure with the peasants then go home and write a ‘little book’ called War and Peace. Incidentally, Sam, he was somebody else who, to quote, ‘…did not distinguish himself scholastically.

Hally: Anyway, that’s my man of magnitude. Charles Darwin! Who’s yours?
Sam: [without hesitation] Abraham Lincoln.
Hally: I might have guessed as much. Don’t get sentimental, Sam. You’ve never been a slave, you know. And anyway, we freed your ancestors here in South Africa long before the Americans.

Hally: It’s a bloody awful world when you come to think of it. People can be real bastards.
Sam: That’s the way it is, Hally.
Hally: It doesn’t have to be that way. There is something called progress you know. We don’t exactly burn people at the stake anymore.

She’s no match for him when it comes to a battle of words.

Don’t talk crap, Hally! You don’t even know what the word ‘sympathy’ means.

Do you think Fathers do any more for their sons, except in terms of money, that Mothers do for their daughters.

Doesn’t it sort of bug you that people like your dad can’t take care of the world?

I thought I was keeping it straight and I’ve suddenly wondered whether it is straight, and whether it matters whether it is or not.

Somebody once said that there are only two places you can be alone—inside your mother’s womb and inside your coffin.

You were scared of the ball because it was big and hard and could hurt you, just like life can hurt you.

Without me breathing down your neck all the time, you’d lean even more to the right than you do now.

A hint of water, a whisper of foam. Long, white tails streaming behind them as they twist and turn in the bay.

There’s no question he’s smarter than I am, but does that give him the right to call me a name like that?

Aah, violence is the only way I can make people pay attention to me.

I’m in the business of making people realize that their opinions aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.