John Grierson Quotations

Political conflicts distort and disturb a people's sense of distinction between matters of importance and matters of urgency. What is vital is disguised by what is merely a matter of well being.

The life of the village became more and more affected by strikes and lock-outs.

The oblique paradox of propaganda is that the lie in the throat becomes, by repetition, the truth in the heart.

Beware the ends of the earth and the exotic: the drama is on your doorstep wherever the slums; are, wherever there is malnutrition, wherever there is exploitation and cruelty.

Some of us learned in a school of philosophy which taught that all was for the common good and nothing for oneself and have never, in any case, regarded the pursuit of happiness as anything other than an aberration of the human spirit.

The cultivation of sensibility on purely personal lines may, in fact, be the very worst training for a world where only the corporate and the cooperative will matter.

Such manifestations I account as representing the creative leadership of the new forces of thought and appreciation which attend changes in technological pattern and therefore of the pattern of human relationships in society.

My personal view is that such total planning by the state is an absolute good and not simply a relative good... I do not myself think of the attitude I take as deriving from Marx - though this undoubtedly will be suggested - but from Fichte and Hegel.

When quick results are imperative, the manipulation of the masses through symbols may be the only quick way of having a critical thing done.

For three hundred years we have had our focus on the individual. We have distinguished him from the objective world as the Middle Ages did not think of doing. We have given him the world and the universe as a playground for exploration and discovery.

And, consequently, the art of propaganda or public information becomes one of the most powerful forms of directive statesmanship.

It is often more important to act than to understand... there are times... when two conflicting opinions, though one happens to be right, are more perilous than one opinion which is wrong.

In fact, the individual outlook becomes less and less valuable and more and more harmful unless it is transmitted into the corporate outlook.

My view... would be that we are entering upon a new and interim society which is neither capitalist nor socialist, but in which we can achieve central planning without loss of individual initiative, by the mere process of absorbing initiative in the function of planning.

The very effect of the education they were given... was to make men think; and, thinking, they became less and less satisfied with the miserable pays they received.

We have built our State on the freedom of personal adventure.

The degree of fresh and dynamic and progressive attitudes may be measured in terms of lines and masses as well as the choice of subject matter.

We believe that the cinema's capacity for getting around, for observing and selecting from life itself can be exploited in a new and vital art form

We believe that the materials and the stories taken from the raw can be finer (more real in the philosophic sense) than the acted article.

I look on cinema as a pulpit, and use it as a propagandist.

Art is not a mirror but a hammer.

In documentary we deal with the actual, and in one sense with the real. But the really real, if I may use that phrase, is something deeper than that. The only reality which counts in the end is the interpretation which is profound