Quotes from Edward Bond

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

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.

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

The truth has got to appear plausible on the stage.

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

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

It seems to me that we are profoundly ignorant of ourselves.

Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society.

The human mind is a dramatic structure in itself and our society is absolutely saturated with drama.

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

All you now do is pursue your private objectives within society. Instead of us being a community, everybody is asked to seek their own personal ends. It's called competition. And competition is antagonism.

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

Your law always does more harm than crime, and your morality is a form of violence.

It's dangerous to tell the truth, truth without power is always dangerous. And we should fight! Freedom's not an idea, it's a passion! If you haven't got it you fight like a fish out of water fighting for air!

I think drama has to push things to extremes so that we can understand what we are doing in our society.

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!

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.

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.

Sacrilege takes strange forms in the young.

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 a god had made the world, might world always be right, that would be so wise, we'd be spared so much suffering. But we made the world - out of our smallness and weakness. Our lives are awkward and fragile...

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

All you now do is pursue your private objectives within society. Instead of us being a community, everybody is asked to seek their own personal ends. It's called competition. And competition is antagonism.