Quotes from Raymond Williams

T]here are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses.

From the late eighteenth century onwards, it is no longer from the practice of community but from being a wanderer that the instinct of fellow-feeling is derived. Thus an essential isolation and silence and loneliness become the carriers of nature and community against the rigours, the cold abstinence, the selfish ease of ordinary society.

We can overcome division only by refusing to be divided.

The total effect of Orwell's work is an effect of paradox. He was a humane man who communicated an extreme of inhuman terror; a man committed to decency who actualised a distinctive squalor.

But a father is more than a person, he's in fact a society, the thing you grow up into.

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

When you go out first on your own. When you marry and settle. When your father dies. When your son leaves home.

When you're young,' Harry said, 'you just see things. There's nothing much to say about them. You don't realize then all the life that's gone into it.

That a life lasts longer than the actual body through which it moves.

The visitor sees beauty; the inhabitant a place where he works and has his friends.

The chapels are for people to meet, and to talk to each other or sing together. Around them, as you know, moves almost the whole life of the village. That, really, is their religion.

You don't speak to people in London, he remembered; in fact you don't speak to people anywhere in England; there is plenty of time for that sort of thing on the appointed occasions –

For here was the station, by the asylum: both on the outskirts, where the Victorians thought they belonged.

the knowable community—to

In this book I have sought to clarify the tradition, but it may be possible to go on from this to a full restatement of principles, taking the theory of culture as a theory of relations between elements in a whole way of life.

Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institution, and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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