Peter Weiss Quotes

28 Sourced Quotes

We're all so clogged with dead ideas
passed from generation to generation
that even the best of us don't know the way out
We invented the Revolution
but we don't know how to run it
Look everyone wants to keep something from the past
a souvenir of the old regime
This man decides to keep a painting
This one keeps his mistress
He [pointing] keeps his garden
He [pointing] keeps his estate
He keeps his country house
He keeps his factories
This man couldn't part with his shipyards
This one kept his army
and that one keeps his king

Peter Weiss
Woe to the man who tries to stretch the imagination of man He shall be mocked he shall be scourged by the blinkered guardians of morality.

Peter Weiss
The only truths we can point to are the ever-changing truths of our own experience.

Peter Weiss
Once we thought a few hundred corpses would be enough then we saw thousands were still too few and today we can't even count all the dead Everywhere you look.

Peter Weiss
We've got rights the right to starve
We've got jobs waiting for work
We're all brothers lousy and dirty
We're all free and equal to die like dogs

Peter Weiss
Our play's chief aim has been to take to bits
Great propositions and their opposites,
See how they work, and let them fight it out,
To point some light on our eternal doubt.
Marat and I both advocated force
But in debate each took a different course.
Both wanted changes, but his views and mine
On using power never could combine.
On the one side, he who thinks our lives
Can be improved by axes and knives,
Or he who, submerged in the imagination,
Seeking a personal annihilation.

Peter Weiss
In Dante the hero would rather flee
and renounce the tempting embrace
instead of yielding to his desires
and enduring the attendant dangers.

Peter Weiss
And now Marat
now I see where
this revolution is heading
To the withering of the individual man
and a slow merging into uniformity
to the death of choice
to self denial
to deadly weakness
in a state
which has no contract with individuals
but which is impregnable

Peter Weiss
Don't be deceived
when our Revolution has been finally stamped out
and they tell you
things are better now
Even if there's no poverty to be seen
because the poverty's been hidden
even if you ever got more wages
and could afford to buy
more of these new and useless goods
which these new industries foist on you
and even if it seems to you
that you never had so much
that is only the slogan of those
who still have much more than you

Peter Weiss
So the poor instead of bread made do with a picture
of the bleeding scourged and nailed-up Christ
and prayed to that image of their helplessness

Peter Weiss
Charlotte Corday walked alone
Paris birds sang sugar calls
Charlotte walked down lanes of stone
through the haze of perfume stalls
Charlotte smelt the dead's gangrene
Heard the singing guillotine

Peter Weiss
Only in his poetry did he have the courage to love.

Peter Weiss
Don't soil your pretty little shoes
The gutter's deep and red
Climb up climb up and ride along with me
the tumbrel driver said But she never said a word
never turned her head Don't soil your pretty little pants
I only go one way
Climb up climb up and ride along with me
There's no gold coach today But she never said a word
never turned her head

Peter Weiss
However hard we try to bring in the new; it comes into being only in the midst of clumsy deals.

Peter Weiss
And the priests looked down into the pit of injustice
and they turned away their faces and said
Our kingdom is not as the kingdom of this world
Our life on earth is but a pilgrimage
The soul lives on humility and patience
at the same time screwing from the poor their last centime
They settled down among their treasures
and ate and drank with princes
and to the starving they said
Suffer
Suffer as he suffered on the cross
for it is the will of God

Peter Weiss
Once and for all
the idea of glorious victories
won by the glorious army
must be wiped out
Neither side is glorious
On either side they're just frightened men messing their pants
and they all want the same thing
Not to lie under the earth
but to walk upon it
without crutches

Peter Weiss
Long ago I abandoned my masterpiece
a roll of paper thirty yards long
which I filled completely with minute handwriting
in my dungeon years ago
It vanished when the Bastille fell
it vanished as everything written
everything thought and planned
will disappear

Peter Weiss
We can say what we like without favour or fear
and what we can't say we can breathe in your ear

Peter Weiss
Fight on land and sea
All men want to be free
If they don't
never mind
we'll abolish all mankind

Peter Weiss
What has gone wrong with
the men who are ruling
I'd like to know who
they think they are fooling
They told us that torture
was over and gone
but everyone knows
the same torture goes on

Peter Weiss
I've twisted and turned them every way,
And can see no ending to our play.

Peter Weiss
Every death even the cruellest death
drowns in the total indifference of Nature
Nature herself would watch unmoved
if we destroyed the entire human race
I hate Nature
this passionless spectator this unbreakable iceberg-face
that can bear everything
this goads us to greater and greater acts

Peter Weiss
With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art.

Peter Weiss
I could buy myself paper, a pen, a pencil and a brush and could create pictures whenever and wherever I wanted. … That evening, in the spring of 1947, on the embankment of the Seine in Paris, at the age of thirty, I saw that it was possible to live and work in the world, and that I could participate in the exchange of ideas that was taking place all around, bound to no country.

Peter Weiss
Against Nature's silence I use action
In the vast indifference I invent a meaning
I don't watch unmoved I intervene
and say that this and this are wrong
and I work to alter them and improve them
The important thing
is to pull yourself up by your own hair
to turn yourself inside out
and see the whole world with fresh eyes

Peter Weiss