A Quote by Edward Bond

What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being. — © Edward Bond
What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.
What is remarkable about the Greeks - even pre-philosophically - is that despite the salience of religious rituals in their lives, when it came to the question of what it is that makes an individual human life worth living they didn't look to the immortals but rather approached the question in mortal terms. Their approaching the question of human mattering in human terms is the singularity that creates the conditions for philosophy in ancient Greece, most especially as these conditions were realized in the city-state of Athens.
The greatest tragedies were written by the Greeks and Shakespeare...neither knew chocolate.
I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being--neither white, black, brown, or red; and when you are dealing with humanity as a family there's no question of integration or intermarriage. It's just one human being marrying another human being or one human being living around and with another human being.
But what if Shakespeare? and Hamlet? were asking the wrong question? What if the real question is not whether to be, but how to be?
It is open to question whether the highly individualized characters we find in Shakespeare are perhaps not detrimental to the dramatic effect. The human being disappears to the same degree as the individual emerges.
God never meant that people were to wear clothes. He meant we were to be nude. But we were in a state of innocence. Then sin came into the human race and became a blood poisoning.
As for climate change, it's by now widely accepted by the scientific community that we have entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene, in which the Earth's climate is being radically modified by human action, creating a very different planet, one that may not be able to sustain organized human life in anything like a form we would want to tolerate.
We ran up to them and they gave us hugs, cookies and chocolate. Being so alone, a hug meant more than anybody could imagine because that replaced the human warmth that we were starving for. We were not only starved for food, but we were starved for human kindness. And the Soviet Army did provide some of that.
Mastery of life is not a question of control, but of finding a balance between human and being...Human is form. Being is formless. Human and Being are not separate but interwoven.
This is a whole new era where we're moving beyond little edits on single genes to being able to write whatever we want throughout the genome. The goal is to be able to change it as radically as our understanding permits.
People knew there were two ways of coming at truth. One was science, or what the Greeks called Logos, reason, logic. And that was essential that the discourse of science or logic related directed to the external world. The other was mythos, what the Greeks called myth, which didn't mean a fantasy story, but it was a narrative associated with ritual and ethical practice but it helped us to address problems for which there were no easy answers, like mortality, cruelty, the sorrow that overtakes us all that's part of the human condition. And these two were not in opposition, we needed both.
Shakespeare's stories are still very strong. He structured fantastic stories about things that were fundamental to the human being and psyche.
I love Shakespeare and the Greeks - learned a lot studying them at one time.
...the program of scientific experimentation that leads you to conclude that animals are imbeciles is profoundly anthropocentric. It values being able to find your way out of a sterile maze, ignoring the fact that if the researcher who designed the maze were to be parachuted into the jungles of Borneo, he or she would be dead of starvation in a week...If I as a human being were told that the standards by which animals are being measured in these experiments are human standards, I would be insulted.
The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.
Once befriended, our shadow becomes a divine map that-when properly read and followed-reconn ects us to the life we were meant to live, the people we were meant to be, and the contributions we were meant to give.
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