Raymond Williams Quotes (8 Quotes)

On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. A contrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times.

Language is, then, positively a distinctly human opening of and opening to the world Not just a distinguishable or instrumental but a constitutive faculty.

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

They tried to kick in my front door and steal my car, ... The gunshots went all through the night.

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

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

Country' and 'city' are very powerful words, and this is not surprising when we remember how much they seem to stand for in the experience of human communities. In English, 'country' is both a nation and a part of a 'land' 'the country' can be the whole society or its rural area. In the long history of human settlements, this connection between the land from which directly or indirectly we all get our living and the achievements of human society has been deeply known.

It wasn't idealism that made me, from the beginning, want a more secure and rational society. It was an intellectual judgment, to which I still hold. When I was young its name was socialism. We can be deflected by names. But the need was absolute, and is still absolute.