Love Quote by David Hare

Hare’s line is a tidy provocation dressed up as common sense: it refuses the comforting idea that we can “balance” feeling and intellect by blending them into a single, wholesome mush. Instead, he describes two distortions. The first type “carries their heart in their head” - emotion masquerading as reason, the kind of tidy argument that’s really a need in disguise. The second “carries their head in their heart” - intellect swallowed by sentiment, where analysis becomes a loyalty test and doubt feels like betrayal. Either way, the self is misfiled.

As a playwright, Hare’s intent isn’t to hand down self-help; it’s to sketch a cast of recognizable moral temperaments, the people who populate his work: politicians who sell desire as policy, idealists who turn principles into theater, professionals whose ethics get rerouted through ambition. The sentence works because it’s diagnostic without sounding clinical. “Carry” implies burden and habit, not a one-time mistake. You walk around like that.

The twist is the prescription: “keep them apart yet working together.” Hare isn’t arguing for cold rationalism or romantic authenticity. He’s arguing for friction - an internal separation of powers. Heart and head should collaborate, but not merge; their job is to check and embarrass each other. In Hare’s world, collapse comes when one annexes the other, and a person (or a country) starts calling appetite a plan, or calling a plan a conscience.