Actual Quote:
“If this were played upon a stage now,
I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.”
In Current Language:
If I witnessed these events played on a stage, I would rate the fiction as unrealistic.
Suggestions For Use: Colorful way to express incredulity at what is happening under your eyes, directly or at a distance.
What Happens in the Actual Play:
Malvolio, Olivia’s butler, is secretly in love with his employer. Other characters in the play trick him into believing that his feelings are reciprocated. One of the pranksters forges a letter to Malvolio, supposedly from Olivia, suggesting that she loves him and that, as a signal that he reciprocates her love, he should wear yellow stockings and smile all the time.
Malvolio does as the letter suggests, but Olivia thinks that he has gone mad and has him locked up. On seeing some of Malvolio’s ridiculous gesturing, a character called Fabio believes that, even as fiction, the plot would be unrealistic. Continue reading
By and large, for an ideology to take root among a people or a nation it is necessary to transform the individual into the mass man. For masses are – before in time and now often in the impalpable ether – what crowds are in space. Namely a large quantity of people unable to express their human qualities – for members of masses are not connected to each other either as individuals or as parts of a community. In fact they are only linked through some impersonal, abstract, crystallizing and often de-humanizing factor. 
When events do not make sense or are such as sense cannot untie,(1) an option is to forget all about them – the head-in-the-sand solution. Another is to remember that man is but a quintessence of dust (2) and often, therefore, not even worth the dust that the rude wind blows in his face. (3)
Comparisons are often like bikinis, what they reveal is suggestive, what they conceal is vital. The principle equally applies when comparing the history of nations, as implied in the title, which echoes Gibbon’s 6-book, monumental “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”.