Harold Pinter: Use

“The government of the US has no moral authority to elect itself as the judge over human rights in Cuba, where there has not been a single case of disappearance, torture or extra-judicial execution since 1959, and where despite the economic blockade, there are levels of health, education and culture that are internationally recognised.”

Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter, et al. "Letters: Human Rights and Cuba" http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,3604,1445897,00.html, The Guardian (26 Mar. 2005). Pinter was a signatory.

Health , Education

“When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror — for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.
I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us — the dignity of man.”

Harold Pinter

Art, Truth & Politics (2005)

Truth , Hope , Thinking , Change

“Sandinistas are a democratically elected government which originally led a popular revolution to overthrow a dictatorship based on slavery…
US foreign policy could be best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I'll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. It can hardly be said to be a complicated foreign policy. What is interesting about it is that it is so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do. I find the ignorance in this country, Britain, and certainly the US, really quite deep. It is not only the Republican Party and government in the US which are responsible for this state of affairs, but I see the Democrats as only differing by degrees. While they say "no more military aid to the Contras"… they are still referring to an innate and deeply embedded assumption that they are talking about a Marxist-Leninist totalitarian dictatorship; gangsters, thugs, instructed from Moscow.”

Harold Pinter

Quoted in an interview http://www.haroldpinter.org/politics/politics_america.shtml, conducted by Andrew Graham-Yooll, South Magazine (May 1988)

Money , Kiss , Success , Country

“We have heard many times that tired, grimy phrase: 'Failure of communication…' and this phrase has been fixed to my work quite consistently. I believe the contrary. I think that we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rear-guard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else's life is too frightening. To disclose the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.”

Harold Pinter

15
Writing for the Theatre (1962)

Life , Communication , Failure , Thinking