Raymond Williams > Quotes

“To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing”
― Raymond Williams

“[T]here are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses.”
― Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism

“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, The Country and the City

“We can overcome division only by refusing to be divided.”
― Raymond Williams

“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

“To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.”
― 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

“Some of the variable words, say lunch and supper and dinner, may be highlighted but the differences are not particularly important. When we come to say `we just don't speak the same language' we mean something more general: that we have different immediate values or different kinds of valuation, or that we are aware, often intangibly, of different formations and distributions of energy and interest. In such a case, each group is speaking its native language, but its uses are significantly different, and especially when strong feelings or important ideas are in question. No single group is `wrong' by any linguistic criterion, though a temporarily dominant group may try to enforce its own uses as `correct'. What is really happening through these critical encounters, which may be very conscious or may be felt only as a certain strangeness and unease, is a process quite central in the development of a language when, in
certain words, tones and rhythms, meanings are offered, felt for, tested, confirmed, asserted, qualified, changed.”
― Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society

“That a life lasts longer than the actual body through which it moves.”
― Raymond Williams, Border Country

“But a father is more than a person, he’s in fact a society, the thing you grow up into.”
― Raymond Williams, Border Country

“He’s studying Wales,’ Eira said, ‘and he goes to London to do it.”
― Raymond Williams, Border Country

“When you go out first on your own. When you marry and settle. When your father dies. When your son leaves home.”
― Raymond Williams, Border Country

“To tolerate only this or only that, according to some given formula, is to submit to the phantasy of having occupied the future and fenced it into fruitful or unfruitful ground. Thus, in the working-class movement, while the clenched fist is a necessary symbol, the clenching ought never to be such that the hand cannot open, and the fingers extend, to discover and give a shape to the newly forming reality.”
― Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780 - 1950

“You cannot think of relatives, friends, neighbors, colleagues, acquaintances, as masses... Masses are other people.”
― Raymond Williams, Culture And Society 1780-1950

“The chapels are for people to meet, and to talk to each other or sing together. Around them, as you know, moves almost the whole life of the village. That, really, is their religion.”
― Raymond Williams, Border Country

“Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institution, and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land.”
― Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780 - 1950

“You don’t speak to people in London, he remembered; in fact you don’t speak to people anywhere in England; there is plenty of time for that sort of thing on the appointed occasions –”
― Raymond Williams, Border Country

“Eleştirellik ve üretkenlik imkânlarımız, ortak bir kelime dağarcığının varlığından kesinlikle ayrılamaz; söylemimizin zenginliği, o kelime dağarcığının zenginliğinin bir işlevidir ve o dağarcığa hâkim olup onu etkin kılmak içinse, diri zihinlere, tarihsel duyarlılığa ve bir sürü soruya kulak kesilmeliyiz.”
― Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society

“The visitor sees beauty; the inhabitant a place where he works and has his friends.”
― Raymond Williams, Border Country

“When you’re young,’ Harry said, ‘you just see things. There’s nothing much to say about them. You don’t realize then all the life that’s gone into it.”
― Raymond Williams, Border Country

“It ought in any case to be clear that English experience is especially significant. In that one of the decisive transformations, in the relations between country and city, occurred very early and with a thoroughness which is still in some ways unappoached.”
― Raymond Williams, The Country and the City

“In this book I have sought to clarify the tradition, but it may be possible to go on from this to a full restatement of principles, taking the theory of culture as a theory of relations between elements in a whole way of life.”
― Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780 - 1950

“For here was the station, by the asylum: both on the outskirts, where the Victorians thought they belonged.”
― Raymond Williams, Border Country

“There’s only one real politics, and that’s politics on a weekly wage. All the rest, well. We can all talk.”
― Raymond Williams, Border Country

“Bureaucracy appears in English from mC19. Carlyle in Latter-day Pamphlets (1850) wrote of `the Continental nuisance called "Bureaucracy" ', and Mill in 1848 wrote of the inexpediency of concentrating all the power of organized action `in a dominant bureaucracy'. In 1818, using an earlier form, Lady Morgan had written of the `Bureaucratic or office tryanny, by which Ireland had been so long governed'. The word was taken from fw bureaucratie, F, rw bureau - writing-desk and then office. The original meaning of bureau was the baize used to cover desks. The English use of bureau as office dates from eC18; it became more common in American use, especially with reference to foreign branches, the French influence being predominant. The increasing scale of commercial organization, with a corresponding increase in government intervention and legal controls, and with the increasing importance of organized and professional central government, produced the political facts to which the new term pointed.”
― Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society

“the knowable community—to”
― Raymond Williams, The English Novel From Dickens To Lawrence