John Grierson Quotes

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Art is not a mirror but a hammer.

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.

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

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.