Raymond Williams Quotes

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

Raymond Williams

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing

Raymond Williams

#7. 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

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

Raymond Williams

#9. 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

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

Raymond Williams

#11. [T]here are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses.

Raymond Williams

#12. 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

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

Raymond Williams

#14. the knowable community - to

Raymond Williams

#15. 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

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

Raymond Williams

#17. 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

#18. We can overcome division only by refusing to be divided.

Raymond Williams

#19. 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