Best 38 quotes of Edward Bond on MyQuotes

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

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.

As Shakespeare himself knew, the peace, the reconciliation that he created on the stage would not last an hour on the street.

At the turn of the century theatre does not have to be prescriptive.

Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.

Fifteen years ago I walked out of a production of one of my plays at the RSC because I decided it was a waste of time.

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

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

I don't think it's the job of theatre at the moment to provide political propaganda; that would be simplistic. We have to explore our situation further before we will understand it.

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

I'm interested in the real world.

I'm not interested in an imaginary world

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

It's insulting to ask a dramatist what his view of his play is. I have no opinion

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

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

I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners. Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and if we do not stop being violent we have no future.

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.

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

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

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

Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human

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

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

The Greeks said very, very extreme things in their tragedies.

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

The one overall structure in my plays is language

The theatre, our theatre, comes from the Greeks

The truth has got to appear plausible on the stage

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

We are still living in the aftershock of Hiroshima, people are still the scars of history.

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

What I try to do in a play is put a problem on stage, head-on, without evasion.

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

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

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 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.

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.