Quotes By Edward Bond

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

I think there is no world without theatre.

The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment.

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

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.

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.

The theatre, our theatre, comes from the Greeks.

I'm interested in the real world.

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

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

At the turn of the century theatre does not have to be prescriptive.

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

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.

I'm not interested in an imaginary world.

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

It's insulting to ask a dramatist what his view of his play is. I have no opinion.

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

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

Whatever the economy needs to maintain itself, the government will do it.

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

You have to go to the ultimate situation in drama.

Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.

Shakespeare has no answers for us at all.

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

It's wonderful to be able to sit down and write a play.

You have to learn the language of Hamlet.

Violence is never a solution in my plays, just as ultimately violence is never a solution in human affairs.

First there was the theatre of people and animals, then of people and the devil. Now we need the theatre of people and people.