Top 40 Edward Bond Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Edward Bond

2. “It seems to me that we are profoundly ignorant of ourselves.”

— Edward Bond

3. “Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human.”

— Edward Bond

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

— Edward Bond

5. “I’m interested in the real world.”

— Edward Bond

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

— Edward Bond

7. “If you can’t face Hiroshima in the theatre, you’ll eventually end up in Hiroshima itself.”

— Edward Bond

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

— Edward Bond

9. “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.”

— Edward Bond

10. “We are still living in the aftershock of Hiroshima, people are still the scars of history.”

— Edward Bond

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

— Edward Bond

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

— Edward Bond

13. “Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.”

— Edward Bond

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

— Edward Bond

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

— Edward Bond

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

— Edward Bond

17. “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.”

— Edward Bond

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

— Edward Bond

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

— Edward Bond

20. “Fifteen years ago I walked out of a production of one of my plays at the RSC because I decided it was a waste of time.”

— Edward Bond

21. “Shakespeare has no answers for us at all.”

— Edward Bond

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

— Edward Bond

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

— Edward Bond

24. “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.”

— Edward Bond

25. “Humanity’s become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you get Chair.”

— Edward Bond

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

— Edward Bond

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

— Edward Bond

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

— Edward Bond

29. “I think drama has to push things to extremes so that we can understand what we are doing in our society.”

— Edward Bond

30. “The theatre, our theatre, comes from the Greeks.”

— Edward Bond

31. “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.”

— Edward Bond

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

— Edward Bond

33. “The one overall structure in my plays is language.”

— Edward Bond

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

— Edward Bond

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

— Edward Bond

36. “The truth has got to appear plausible on the stage.”

— Edward Bond

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

— Edward Bond

38. “It’s insulting to ask a dramatist what his view of his play is. I have no opinion.”

— Edward Bond

39. “Sacrilege takes strange forms in the young.”

— Edward Bond

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

— Edward Bond

41. “The artist tries to show reason in experience and appearance – and lyric is the daily appearance, the commonplace dress, of reason. It shows us the rational. It makes the epic pattern human. It’s the footprint on the pathway. In the epic-lyric the individual and particular are no longer isolated but are placed in a historical, social, human pattern. That’s why there’s a political way of cutting bread or wearing shoes.”

— Edward Bond

42. “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.”

— Edward Bond

43. “It’s wonderful to be able to sit down and write a play.”

— Edward Bond