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Magazine
Summer/Fall 2002

Quotable Williams

A couple of our favorite Raymond Williams quotes:

“There’s one way of posing an issue that’s fairly simplistic: it’s either/or. That’s the kind of simplicity that is characteristic of culture wars. But to work through an issue with some sophistication is generally to re-cast the question so that the question is richer, more interesting, and hence more fruitful for creative solution than an either/or. If you deal with an issue as a question of either/or, you can fall into a power struggle very easily. If you approach an issue striving to re-phrase the question in a way that can enrich the conversation, then you get a question not of power, but the creativity of intellectual discourse and the nature of the human community as people who communicate with one another. And through that communication you create community and forward movement."

“It’s not chaos that brings forth creativity, it’s stability. When you’ve been married to the same woman, worked in the same department, been a part of the same community for so many years, then you can thrive, then you can be creative, then you can travel around the world.”

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