Raymond Williams Quotes & Sayings

The total effect of Orwell's work is an effect of paradox. He was a humane man who communicated an extreme of inhuman terror; a man committed to decency who actualised a distinctive squalor. — Raymond Williams

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

Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. — Raymond Williams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[T]here are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses. — Raymond Williams

If Gissing is less compassionately observant than Mrs Gaskell, less overtly polemical than Kingsley, still The Nether World and Demos would be sympathetically endorsed by either of them, or by their typical readers. Yet Gissing does introduce an important new element, and one that remains significant. He has often been called 'the spokesman of despair,' and this is true in both meanings of the phrase. Like Kingsley and Mrs Gaskell, he writes to describe the true conditions of the poor, and to protest against those brute forces of society which fill with wreck the abysses of the nether world. Yet he is also the spokesman of another kind of despair: the despair born of social and political disillusion. In this he is a figure exactly like Orwell in our own day, and for much the same reason. Whether one calls this honesty or not will depend on experience. — Raymond Williams

From the late eighteenth century onwards, it is no longer from the practice of community but from being a wanderer that the instinct of fellow-feeling is derived. Thus an essential isolation and silence and loneliness become the carriers of nature and community against the rigours, the cold abstinence, the selfish ease of ordinary society. — Raymond Williams

We can overcome division only by refusing to be divided. — Raymond Williams

To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing — Raymond Williams

The gap between our feelings and our social observation is dangerously wide. — Raymond Williams

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

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

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

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

The idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history. — Raymond Williams

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

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

the knowable community - to — Raymond Williams