Raymond Williams Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Raymond Williams
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
Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.

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

Raymond Williams
The idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history.

Raymond Williams
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
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
It is as if a really secure nationalism, already in possession of its nation-state, can fail to see itself as 'nationalist' at all. Its own distinctive bonding is perceived as natural and obvious by contrast with the mere projections of any nationalism which is still in active progress and thus incomplete. At this point radicals and minority nationalists emphasize the artificialities of the settled 'common sense' nation-state and to their own satisfaction shoot them to pieces from history and from social theory.

Raymond Williams
It wasn't idealism that made me, from the beginning, want a more secure and rational society. It was an intellectual judgement, 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
The gap between our feelings and our social observation is dangerously wide.

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

Raymond Williams
Real independence is a time of new and active creation: people sure enough of themselves to discard their baggage; knowing the past is past, as shaping history, but with a new confident sense of the present and the future, where the decisive meanings and values will be made.

Raymond Williams