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Raymond Williams Quotes

Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh Marxist theorist, academic, novelist and critic. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature made a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. Some 750,000 copies of his books have sold in UK editions alone and there are many translations available. His work laid the foundations for the field of cultural studies and the cultural materialist approach. Wikipedia  

✵ 31. August 1921 – 26. January 1988
Raymond Williams photo

Works

Culture and Society
Raymond Williams
The Long Revolution
The Long Revolution
Raymond Williams
Culture and Society
Raymond Williams
The Long Revolution
The Long Revolution
Raymond Williams
Raymond Williams: 12 quotes4 likes

Famous Raymond Williams Quotes

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

Raymond Williams

Resources of Hope (published posthumously in 1989), p. 118

“Real independence is a time of new and active creation: people sure enough of themselves to discard their baggage; knowing the past is past, as shaping history, but with a new confident sense of the present and the future, where the decisive meanings and values will be made.”

Raymond Williams

1975

“Every aspect of personal life is radically affected by the quality of general life, and yet the general life is seen at its most important in completely personal terms.”

Raymond Williams book The Long Revolution

Realism and the Contemporary Novel (1961): The Long Revolution

“The gap between our feelings and our social observation is dangerously wide.”

Raymond Williams book The Long Revolution

Realism and the Contemporary Novel (1961): The Long Revolution

“If from poetry we expect a succession of signals for the release of miscellaneous private emotion we are likely to find Tears, Idle Tears valuable.”

Raymond Williams

Reading and Criticism (1950)

“It is as if a really secure nationalism, already in possession of its nation-state, can fail to see itself as 'nationalist' at all. Its own distinctive bonding is perceived as natural and obvious by contrast with the mere projections of any nationalism which is still in active progress and thus incomplete. At this point radicals and minority nationalists emphasize the artificialities of the settled 'common sense' nation-state and to their own satisfaction shoot them to pieces from history and from social theory.”

Raymond Williams

Who Speaks For Wales?: Nation, Culture, Identity (published posthumously in 2003), p. 193

“We all like to think of ourselves as a standard, and I can see that it is genuinely difficult for the English middle class to suppose that the working class is not desperately anxious to become just like itself. I am afraid this must be unlearned.”

Raymond Williams book Culture and Society

Culture and Society (1958)

“My own view is that if, in a socialist society, the basic cultural skills are made widely available, and the channels of communication widened and cleared, as much as possible has been done in the way of preparation, and what then emerges will be an actual response to the whole reality, an so valuable.”

Raymond Williams book Culture and Society

Culture and Society (1958) p. 283

Raymond Williams Quotes about change

“There has never been a time, until the last fifty years, when a majority of any population had regular and constant access to drama, and used this access. . . . It seems probable that in societies like Britain and the United States more drama is watched in a week or weekend, by the majority of viewers, than would have been watched in a year or in some cases a lifetime in any previous historical period. It is clearly one of the unique characteristics of advanced industrial societies that drama as an experience is now an intrinsic part of everyday life, at a quantitative level which is so very much greater than any precedent as to seem a fundamental qualitative change. Whatever the social and cultural reasons may finally be, it is clear that watching dramatic simulation of a wide range of experiences is now an essential part of our modern cultural pattern.”

Raymond Williams

Television: Technology and Cultural Form

“It is then in making hope practical, rather than despair convincing, that we must resume and change and extend our campaigns.”

Raymond Williams

"The Politics of Nuclear Disarmament" (1980), in Resources of Hope (1989).

“The shaping influence of economic change can of course be distinguished, as most notably in the period with which this book is concerned. But the difficulty lies in estimating the final importance of a factor which never, in practice, appears in isolation.”

Raymond Williams book Culture and Society

Culture and Society (1958) p. 280

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