Raymond Williams Quotes

• To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair inevitable.

  Raymond Williams

  Despair, Inevitable, Radical

  26 Copy quote

• Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.

  Raymond Williams

  Two, Three, Culture

  Raymond Williams (2014). “Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society”, p.49, Oxford University Press

  27 Copy quote

• On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. A contrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times.

  Raymond Williams

  Country, Powerful, Communication

  Raymond Williams (1975). “The Country and the City”, p.1, Oxford University Press, USA

  27 Copy quote

• There are no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses

  Raymond Williams

  People, Way, Mass

  Raymond Williams, Andrew Milner (2010). “Tenses of Imagination: Raymond Williams on Science Fiction, Utopia and Dystopia”, p.13, Peter Lang

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• The human crisis is always a crisis of understanding: what we genuinely understand we can do.

  Raymond Williams

  Understanding, Crisis, Humans

  1958 Culture and Society, ch.3.

  22 Copy quote

• The real dividing line between things we call work and the things we call leisure is that in leisure, however active we may be, we make our own choices and our own decisions. We feel for the time being that our life is our own.

  Raymond Williams

  Real, Choices, Decision

  29 Copy quote

• The gap between our feelings and our social observation is dangerously wide.

  Raymond Williams

  Feelings, Gaps, Social

  Raymond Williams (2001). “The Long Revolution”, p.311, Broadview Press

  16 Copy quote

• Once we begin to speak of men mixing their labour with the earth, we are in a whole world of new relations between man and nature, and to separate natural history from social history becomes extremely problematic.

  Raymond Williams

  Men, Mixing, World

  Raymond Williams (2005). “Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays”, p.76, Verso

  17 Copy quote

• The idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history.

  Raymond Williams

  Ideas, Unnoticed, Humans

  Raymond Williams (2005). “Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays”, p.67, Verso

  19 Copy quote

• What breaks capitalism, all that will ever break capitalism, is capitalists. The faster they run the more strain on their heart.

  Raymond Williams

  Running, Heart, Break

  Raymond Williams (1985). “Loyalties”, Hodder & Stoughton

  23 Copy quote

• We all like to think of ourselves as a standard, and I can see that it is genuinely difficult for the English middle class to suppose that the working class is not desperately anxious to become just like itself. I am afraid this must be unlearned.

  Raymond Williams

  Thinking, Class, Middle

  "Culture and Society". Book by Raymond Williams, 1958.

  21 Copy quote

• Every aspect of personal life is radically affected by the quality of general life, and yet the general life is seen at its most important in completely personal terms.

  Raymond Williams

  Important, Quality, Life Is

  Raymond Williams (2001). “The Long Revolution”, p.305, Broadview Press

  19 Copy quote

• It is not primarily ideas that have a history; it is societies. And then what often seem opposed ideas can in the end be seen as parts of a single social process.

  Raymond Williams

  Ideas, Social, Ends

  Raymond Williams (2005). “Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays”, p.78, Verso

  13 Copy quote

• Most works of art are effectively treated as commodities and most artists, even when they justly claim quite other intentions, areeffectively treated as a category of independent craftsmen or skilled workers producing a certain kind of marginal commodity.

  Raymond Williams

  Art, Independent, Kind

  9 Copy quote

• Country' and 'city' are very powerful words, and this is not surprising when we remember how much they seem to stand for in the experience of human communities. In English, 'country' is both a nation and a part of a 'land'; 'the country' can be the whole society or its rural area. In the long history of human settlements, this connection between the land from which directly or indirectly we all get our living and the achievements of human society has been deeply known.

  Raymond Williams

  Country, Powerful, Land

  Raymond Williams (1975). “The Country and the City”, p.1, Oxford University Press, USA

  17 Copy quote

• It wasn't idealism that made me, from the beginning, want a more secure and rational society. It was an intellectual judgment, to which I still hold. When I was young its name was socialism. We can be deflected by names. But the need was absolute, and is still absolute.

  Raymond Williams

  Names, Intellectual, Needs

  Raymond Williams (2013). “Loyalties”, p.331, Random House

  22 Copy quote

• A very large part of English middle-class education is devoted to the training of servants...In so far as it is, by definition, the training of upper servants, it includes, of course, the instilling of that kind of confidence which will enable the upper servants to supervise and direct the lower servants.

  Raymond Williams

  Education, Class, Training

  8 Copy quote

• What is often being argued, it seems to me, in the idea of nature is the idea of man; and this not only generally, or in ultimate ways, but the idea of man in society, indeed the ideas of kinds of societies.

  Raymond Williams

  Men, Ideas, Way

  14 Copy quote

• A contrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times.

  Raymond Williams

  Country, Cities, Fundamentals

  Raymond Williams (1975). “The Country and the City”, p.1, Oxford University Press, USA

  12 Copy quote

• If from poetry we expect a succession of signals for the release of miscellaneous private emotion we are likely to find Tears, Idle Tears valuable.

  Raymond Williams

  Tears, Emotion, Release

  "Reading and Criticism". Book by Raymond Williams, 1950.

  7 Copy quote

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