Raymond Williams famous quotes

07-11-2025

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

#Thinking #Class #Middle
The gap between our feelings and our social observation is dangerously wide.
-- Raymond Williams

#Feelings #Gaps #Social
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

#Quality #Important #Life Is
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

#Tears #Emotion #Signals
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

#Country #Powerful #Communication
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

#Country #Powerful #Land
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

#Names #Intellectual #Needs
The human crisis is always a crisis of understanding: what we genuinely understand we can do.
-- Raymond Williams

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

#Running #Heart #Break
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair inevitable.
-- Raymond Williams

#Despair #Inevitable #Radical
There are no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses
-- Raymond Williams

#People #Way #Mass
The idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history.
-- Raymond Williams

#Ideas #Unnoticed #Humans
A contrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times.
-- Raymond Williams

#Country #Cities #Way
Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.
-- Raymond Williams

#Two #Three #Culture
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

#Art #Independent #Kind

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