Raymond Williams Quotes

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.

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.

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

There are no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

A very large part of English middle-class education is devoted to the training of servants...In so far as it is, by definition, the training of upper servants, it includes, of course, the instilling of that kind of confidence which will enable the upper servants to supervise and direct the lower servants.

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.