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

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More quotes from: Edward Bond

• "All I can do is instil this with urgency into my drama. "
• "All you now do is pursue your private objectives within society. Instead of us being ..."
• "Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only ..."
• "At the turn of the century theatre does not have to be prescriptive. "
• "Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur. "
• "But I'm not interested in violence for the sake of violence. "
• "But nobody imagined Auschwitz, nobody imagined Hiroshima. "
• "But we are not in the world to be good but to change it. "
• "But when we lose humanness we have no way of knowing we have lost it. "
• "Fifteen years ago I walked out of a production of one of my plays at ..."
• "First there was the theatre of people and animals, then of people and the devil. ..."
• "Humanity's become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you ..."
• "I don't think it's the job of theatre at the moment to provide political propaganda; ..."
• "I have to do is to make people realise that they need justice to be ..."
• "I think there is no world without theatre. "
• "I want to sum up my rejection of Brecht. Of course he meant very well. ..."
• "I write plays not to make money, but to stop myself from going mad. Because ..."
• "I'm interested in the real world. "
• "I'm not interested in an imaginary world. "
• "If you engage people on a vital, important level, they will respond. "
• "In the end I think theatre has only one subject: justice. "
• "In the past goodness was always a collective experience. Then goodness became privatised. "

• "It could be iconoclastic but not static; not the dream world of performance art, the ..."
• "It has to be both iconoclastic and iconographic because that is the function imposed on ..."
• "It seems to me that we are profoundly ignorant of ourselves. "
• "It's insulting to ask a dramatist what his view of his play is. I have ..."
• "It's wonderful to be able to sit down and write a play. "
• "Later when bombs were dropped in the first Gulf War I spoke at a peace ..."
• "My plays are not particularly violent, actually. "
• "Now, drama is quite useful at helping us to understand what our position is and, ..."
• "Our theatre takes the great questions and trivialises them. "
• "Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human. "
• "Our unconscious makes us sane; it is only in an insane society that our unconscious ..."
• "Religion enabled society to organise itself to debate goodness, just as Greek drama had once ..."
• "Saved is almost irresponsibly optimistic. "
• "Shakespeare has no answers for us at all. "
• "So society has become more and more disorientated, lost and destructive. "
• "The Comedie Francaise says I'm the most important theoretician of drama since Brecht. "
• "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 ..."
• "The natural order says certain things are born, make love, eat and die. "
• "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. "
• "The unconscious sees through us and our social corruption and sends us messages of our ..."
• "The world of Chair is absolutely possible if we don't learn to describe what's happening ..."
• "Theatre need not formalise questions and consume audiences by empty entertainment. "
• "Violence is hidden within democratic structures because they are not radically democratic - Western democracy ..."
• "Violence is never a solution in my plays, just as ultimately violence is never a ..."
• "We are still living in the aftershock of Hiroshima, people are still the scars of ..."
• "We may seem competent, but by the end of next century there will be new ..."
• "We were sent home in time for them - the blitz. I was bombed night ..."
• "We're on a treadmill, and the fact that some of the bars of the treadmill ..."
• "What I try to do in a play is put a problem on stage, head-on, ..."
• "What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant ..."
• "Whatever the economy needs to maintain itself, the government will do it. "
• "When humanness is lost the radical difference between the bodies in the pit and people ..."
• "You have to articulate ideas through human beings whom you judge in the same way ..."
• "You have to go to the ultimate situation in drama. "
• "You have to learn the language of Hamlet. "
• "You've said that you cannot make drama popular. I absolutely disbelieve this. "