Edward Bond Quotes

But we are not in the world to be good but to change it.

Our lives are awkward and fragile and we have only one thing to keep us sane: pity, and the man without pity is mad.

[The ruling class] sees people in the working class as being almost animals. It sees itself as being synonymous with civilization and its cultivation as coming from its natural abilities and not from its wealth and privileged opportunities. It doesn't see that the way in which it monopolizes these things distorts the culture it derives from them and that this makes its culture irrational and an enemy of civilization.

Religion enabled society to organise itself to debate goodness, just as Greek drama had once done.

Violence is never a solution in my plays, just as ultimately violence is never a solution in human affairs.

Shakespeare has no answers for us at all.

When humanness is lost the radical difference between the bodies in the pit and people walking on the street is lost.

The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment.

If you can't face Hiroshima in the theatre, you'll eventually end up in Hiroshima itself

First there was the theatre of people and animals, then of people and the devil. Now we need the theatre of people and people.

It's politely assumed that democracy is a means of containing and restraining violence. But violence comes not from genes but from ideas.

You have to go to the ultimate situation in drama.

Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.

The one overall structure in my plays is language.

Law and order is one of the steps taken to maintain injustice.

WANG. We live in a time of great change. It is easy to find monsters- and as easy to find heroes. To judge rightly what is good - to choose between good and evil - that is all that is to be human.

In the past goodness was always a collective experience. Then goodness became privatised.

Violence is hidden within democratic structures because they are not radically democratic - Western democracy is merely a domestic convenience of consumerism.

It's wonderful to be able to sit down and write a play.

Humanity's become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you get Chair.

I write plays not to make money, but to stop myself from going mad. Because it's my way of making the world rational to me.

What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.

Now, drama is quite useful at helping us to understand what our position is and, conversely, we might then understand why our theatre is being destroyed.

We may seem competent, but by the end of next century there will be new deserts, new ruins.

You have to learn the language of Hamlet.

O burn the house! You've murdered the husband, slaughtered the cattle, poisoned the well, raped the mother, killed the child - you must burn the house! You're soldiers - you must do your duty ... O burn the house! Burn the house! Burn the house!

Art is the expression of the conviction that we can have a rational relationship with the world and each other. It isn't the faith or hope that we can, it is the demonstration that we can.

The artist tries to show reason in experience and appearance – and lyric is the daily appearance, the commonplace dress, of reason. It shows us the rational. It makes the epic pattern human. It's the footprint on the pathway. In the epic-lyric the individual and particular are no longer isolated but are placed in a historical, social, human pattern. That's why there's a political way of cutting bread or wearing shoes.

If you engage people on a vital, important level, they will respond.