Raymond Williams
Raymond Williams
Raymond Henry Williamswas a Welsh 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 are 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...
NationalityWelsh
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth31 August 1921
We need to establish better complaint procedures and policies so consumers know what their rights are. They don't know what their rights are.
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
They tried to kick in my front door and steal my car. The gunshots went all through the night.
They tried to kick in my front door and steal my car, ... The gunshots went all through the night.
Language is, then, positively a distinctly human opening of and opening to the world: Not just a distinguishable or instrumental but a constitutive faculty.
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.
The gap between our feelings and our social observation is dangerously wide.
Most works of art are effectively treated as commodities and most artists, even when they justly claim quite other intentions, areeffectively treated as a category of independent craftsmen or skilled workers producing a certain kind of marginal commodity.
A contrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times.
It wasn't idealism that made me, from the beginning, want a more secure and rational society. It was an intellectual judgment, to which I still hold. When I was young its name was socialism. We can be deflected by names. But the need was absolute, and is still absolute.
A very large part of English middle-class education is devoted to the training of servants...In so far as it is, by definition, the training of upper servants, it includes, of course, the instilling of that kind of confidence which will enable the upper servants to supervise and direct the lower servants.
It is not primarily ideas that have a history; it is societies. And then what often seem opposed ideas can in the end be seen as parts of a single social process.
What breaks capitalism, all that will ever break capitalism, is capitalists. The faster they run the more strain on their heart.
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.