Words matter. These are the best Edward Bond Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human.
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.
Whatever the economy needs to maintain itself, the government will do it.
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.
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.
In the past goodness was always a collective experience. Then goodness became privatised.
In the end I think theatre has only one subject: justice.
Now, drama is quite useful at helping us to understand what our position is and, conversely, we might then understand why our theatre is being destroyed.
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.
You have to go to the ultimate situation in drama.
The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment.
But we are not in the world to be good but to change it.
The human mind is a dramatic structure in itself and our society is absolutely saturated with drama.
Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.
I’m interested in the real world.
The truth has got to appear plausible on the stage.
It’s insulting to ask a dramatist what his view of his play is. I have no opinion.
First there was the theatre of people and animals, then of people and the devil. Now we need the theatre of people and people.
It’s politely assumed that democracy is a means of containing and restraining violence. But violence comes not from genes but from ideas.
We may seem competent, but by the end of next century there will be new deserts, new ruins.
When humanness is lost the radical difference between the bodies in the pit and people walking on the street is lost.
Violence is never a solution in my plays, just as ultimately violence is never a solution in human affairs.
If you engage people on a vital, important level, they will respond.
The theatre, our theatre, comes from the Greeks.
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.
What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.
Religion enabled society to organise itself to debate goodness, just as Greek drama had once done.
We are still living in the aftershock of Hiroshima, people are still the scars of history.
