Julian Beck > Quotes

“You cannot be free if you are contained within a fiction.”
― Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

“There is a misery of the body and a misery of the mind, and if the stars, whenever we looked at them, poured nectar into our mouths, and the grass became bread, we would still be sad. We live in a system that manufactures sorrow, spilling it out of its mill, the waters of sorrow, ocean, storm, and we drown down, dead, too soon... uprising is the reversal of the system, and revolution is the turning of tides.”
― Julian Beck

“We are a feelingless people. If we could really feel, the pain would be so great that we would stop all the suffering. If we could feel that one person every six seconds dies of starvation (and as this is happening, this writing, this reading, someone is dying of starvation) we would stop it. If we could really feel it in the bowels, the groin, in the throat, in the breast, we would go into the streets and stop the war, stop slavery, stop the prisons, stop the killings, stop destruction. Ah, I might learn what love is.

When we feel, we will feel the emergency: when we feel the emergency, we will act: when we act, we will change the world.”
― Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

“Nós vivemos numa sociedade esquizofrénica, em que tudo está compartimentado, a começar pelos indivíduos, os quais têm, no interior da sua solidão, outros compartimentos. Há que modificar isso, há que fazer comunicar o coração, o corpo, o cérebro, etc.”
― Julian Beck

“Among my brethren are many who dream with wet pleasure of the eight hundred pains and humiliations, but I am the other kind: I am a slave who dreams of escape after escape, I dream only of escaping, ascent, of a thousand possible ways to make a hole in the wall, of melting the bars, escape escape, of burning the whole prison down if necessary.”
― Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre