Edward Bond Quotes

#1. Religion enabled society to organise itself to debate goodness, just as Greek drama had once done.

Edward Bond

#2. All you now do is pursue your private objectives within society. Instead of us being a community, everybody is asked to seek their own personal ends. It's called competition. And competition is antagonism.

Edward Bond

#3. Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.

Edward Bond

#4. I write plays not to make money, but to stop myself from going mad. Because it's my way of making the world rational to me.

Edward Bond

#5. You have to learn the language of Hamlet.

Edward Bond

#6. Sacrilege takes strange forms in the young.

Edward Bond

#7. First there was the theatre of people and animals, then of people and the devil. Now we need the theatre of people and people.

Edward Bond

#8. The Greeks said very, very extreme things in their tragedies.

Edward Bond

#9. I think there is no world without theatre.

Edward Bond

#10. The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment.

Edward Bond

#11. The one overall structure in my plays is language.

Edward Bond

#12. We are still living in the aftershock of Hiroshima, people are still the scars of history.

Edward Bond

#13. Our lives are awkward and fragile and we have only one thing to keep us sane: pity, and the man without pity is mad.

Edward Bond

#14. We may seem competent, but by the end of next century there will be new deserts, new ruins.

Edward Bond

#15. O burn the house! You've murdered the husband, slaughtered the cattle, poisoned the well, raped the mother, killed the child - you must burn the house! You're soldiers - you must do your duty ... O burn the house! Burn the house! Burn the house!

Edward Bond

#16. If you engage people on a vital, important level, they will respond.

Edward Bond

#17. Violence is never a solution in my plays, just as ultimately violence is never a solution in human affairs.

Edward Bond

#18. The truth has got to appear plausible on the stage.

Edward Bond

#19. It's politely assumed that democracy is a means of containing and restraining violence. But violence comes not from genes but from ideas.

Edward Bond

#20. The human mind is a dramatic structure in itself and our society is absolutely saturated with drama.

Edward Bond

#21. Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society.

Edward Bond

#22. Fifteen years ago I walked out of a production of one of my plays at the RSC because I decided it was a waste of time.

Edward Bond

#23. Shakespeare has no answers for us at all.

Edward Bond

#24. Law and order is one of the steps taken to maintain injustice.

Edward Bond

#25. If you can't face Hiroshima in the theatre, you'll eventually end up in Hiroshima itself

Edward Bond

#26. What I try to do in a play is put a problem on stage, head-on, without evasion.

Edward Bond

#27. If a god had made the world, might world always be right, that would be so wise, we'd be spared so much suffering. But we made the world - out of our smallness and weakness. Our lives are awkward and fragile ...

Edward Bond

#28. I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners. Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and if we do not stop being violent we have no future.

Edward Bond

#29. I'm interested in the real world.

Edward Bond

#30. It's insulting to ask a dramatist what his view of his play is. I have no opinion.

Edward Bond

#31. Art is the expression of the conviction that we can have a rational relationship with the world and each other. It isn't the faith or hope that we can, it is the demonstration that we can.

Edward Bond

#32. Violence is hidden within democratic structures because they are not radically democratic - Western democracy is merely a domestic convenience of consumerism.

Edward Bond

#33. Your law always does more harm than crime, and your morality is a form of violence.

Edward Bond

#34. Humanity's become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you get Chair.

Edward Bond

#35. What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.

Edward Bond

#36. When humanness is lost the radical difference between the bodies in the pit and people walking on the street is lost.

Edward Bond

#37. Whatever the economy needs to maintain itself, the government will do it.

Edward Bond

#38. It's dangerous to tell the truth, truth without power is always dangerous. And we should fight! Freedom's not an idea, it's a passion! If you haven't got it you fight like a fish out of water fighting for air!

Edward Bond

#39. The theatre, our theatre, comes from the Greeks.

Edward Bond

#40. In the end I think theatre has only one subject: justice.

Edward Bond

#41. In the past goodness was always a collective experience. Then goodness became privatised.

Edward Bond

#42. But we are not in the world to be good but to change it.

Edward Bond

#43. It seems to me that we are profoundly ignorant of ourselves.

Edward Bond

#44. I'm not interested in an imaginary world.

Edward Bond

#45. WANG. We live in a time of great change. It is easy to find monsters- and as easy to find heroes. To judge rightly what is good - to choose between good and evil - that is all that is to be human.

Edward Bond

#46. I don't think it's the job of theatre at the moment to provide political propaganda; that would be simplistic. We have to explore our situation further before we will understand it.

Edward Bond

#47. You have to go to the ultimate situation in drama.

Edward Bond

#48. At the turn of the century theatre does not have to be prescriptive.

Edward Bond

#49. As Shakespeare himself knew, the peace, the reconciliation that he created on the stage would not last an hour on the street.

Edward Bond

#50. It's wonderful to be able to sit down and write a play.

Edward Bond

#51. Now, drama is quite useful at helping us to understand what our position is and, conversely, we might then understand why our theatre is being destroyed.

Edward Bond

#52. Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human.

Edward Bond