"We're on a treadmill, and the fact that some of the bars of the treadmill are made of sugar candy, and we can lick them as they go round, doesn't make our position any securer."

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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 politely assumed that democracy is a means of containing and restraining violence. But violence ..."
• "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 ..."
• "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. "