"When they speak, dead frogs fall out of their mouths"
About this Quote
It is insult as stagecraft: not a complaint about bad breath, but a grotesque image engineered to make language look physically rotten. When David Hare says, "When they speak, dead frogs fall out of their mouths", he’s weaponizing the theater’s favorite trick: turning an abstract moral diagnosis into something you can practically smell from the front row. Frogs belong to ponds and childhood; make them dead and you’ve got corruption plus waste. Make them fall out of a mouth and the problem isn’t private vice, it’s public speech - the thing politicians, executives, and institutional spokespeople trade in for power.
Hare’s intent is less to name a single liar than to indict a whole class of people whose words have become compost: PR euphemisms, parliamentary evasions, managerial empathy. The line implies that their language isn’t merely false; it’s already decomposing at the moment of utterance. The listener doesn’t have to fact-check. The body itself testifies.
The subtext is theatrical and moral: speech is supposed to be the human tool for reason, accountability, persuasion. Hare flips that expectation into a slap of disgust. In his dramatic universe, institutions don’t collapse because no one can talk; they collapse because the wrong people talk too smoothly, and everyone else gets trained to accept the smell as normal.
Contextually, this is Hare in his familiar terrain: British public life, where decorum can function as camouflage. The image punctures that civility with a burlesque of decay, forcing the audience to feel what it’s like to be governed by language that’s already dead on arrival.
Hare’s intent is less to name a single liar than to indict a whole class of people whose words have become compost: PR euphemisms, parliamentary evasions, managerial empathy. The line implies that their language isn’t merely false; it’s already decomposing at the moment of utterance. The listener doesn’t have to fact-check. The body itself testifies.
The subtext is theatrical and moral: speech is supposed to be the human tool for reason, accountability, persuasion. Hare flips that expectation into a slap of disgust. In his dramatic universe, institutions don’t collapse because no one can talk; they collapse because the wrong people talk too smoothly, and everyone else gets trained to accept the smell as normal.
Contextually, this is Hare in his familiar terrain: British public life, where decorum can function as camouflage. The image punctures that civility with a burlesque of decay, forcing the audience to feel what it’s like to be governed by language that’s already dead on arrival.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
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