Raymond Williams Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

We can overcome division only by refusing to be divided.