Culture and Society Quotes

“To tolerate only this or only that, according to some given formula, is to submit to the phantasy of having occupied the future and fenced it into fruitful or unfruitful ground. Thus, in the working-class movement, while the clenched fist is a necessary symbol, the clenching ought never to be such that the hand cannot open, and the fingers extend, to discover and give a shape to the newly forming reality.”
― Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780 - 1950

“You cannot think of relatives, friends, neighbors, colleagues, acquaintances, as masses... Masses are other people.”
― Raymond Williams, Culture And Society 1780-1950

“Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institution, and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land.”
― Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780 - 1950

“In this book I have sought to clarify the tradition, but it may be possible to go on from this to a full restatement of principles, taking the theory of culture as a theory of relations between elements in a whole way of life.”
― Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780 - 1950