Edward Bond Quotes

I think there is no world without theatre.

I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners. Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and if we do not stop being violent we have no future.

In the end I think theatre has only one subject: justice

Our lives are awkward and fragile and we have only one thing to keep us sane: pity, and the man without pity is mad.

If you engage people on a vital, important level, they will respond.

All you now do is pursue your private objectives within society. Instead of us being a community, everybody is asked to seek their own personal ends. It's called competition. And competition is antagonism.

But we are not in the world to be good but to change it.

Art is the expression of the conviction that we can have a rational relationship with the world and each other. It isn't the faith or hope that we can, it is the demonstration that we can.

The Greeks said very, very extreme things in their tragedies.

What I try to do in a play is put a problem on stage, head-on, without evasion.

I'm not interested in an imaginary world

What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.

The human mind is a dramatic structure in itself and our society is absolutely saturated with drama

I write plays not to make money, but to stop myself from going mad. Because it's my way of making the world rational to me.

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

In the past goodness was always a collective experience. Then goodness became privatised.

When humanness is lost the radical difference between the bodies in the pit and people walking on the street is lost.

Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society.

Religion enabled society to organise itself to debate goodness, just as Greek drama had once done.

We may seem competent, but by the end of next century there will be new deserts, new ruins.

I don't think it's the job of theatre at the moment to provide political propaganda; that would be simplistic. We have to explore our situation further before we will understand it.

Humanity's become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you get Chair.

Violence is hidden within democratic structures because they are not radically democratic - Western democracy is merely a domestic convenience of consumerism.

As Shakespeare himself knew, the peace, the reconciliation that he created on the stage would not last an hour on the street.

Law and order is one of the steps taken to maintain injustice.