I turned down the OBE because its not a club you want to join when you look at the villains whove got it. Its all the things I think are despicable: patronage, deferring to the monarchy and the name of the British Empire, which is a monument of exploitation and conquest.
Interpretation
Ken Loach rejects the OBE due to its associations with exploitation and questionable values.
In this quote, Ken Loach expresses his disdain for the Order of the British Empire (OBE), highlighting that it is often awarded to individuals who embody what he considers despicable qualities, such as patronage and loyalty to a monarchy that represents a legacy of colonialism and oppression. By refusing the honor, he critiques the values associated with the OBE and the imperial narrative it represents.
In practice
In a speech addressing inequality, one might quote Ken Loach to highlight the dangers of institutional honors tied to exploitative systems.
Film can do lots of things: It can produce alternative ideas, ask questions, just record the reality of what's happening, it can analyze what's happening. Of course, most commercial films are controlled by big corporations who have an interest in not doing those films.
A film has got to demand to be made. Otherwise - if it's just, 'Shall we? Why not?' - you shouldn't make it.
I think it's time British filmmakers stopped allowing themselves to be colonized so ruthlessly by U.S. ideas and stopped looking so slavishly to the U.S. market. It demeans filmmaking when they do that.
We have to defend the migrant workers and give them our support and demand that they have the rights that workers here have from day one, but absolutely hate the system that forces people to leave their country, leave their homes, leave their families, to go somewhere else to be exploited.
In all things there is a law of cycles.
This world in which we live needs beauty in order not to sink into despair. It is beauty, like truth, which brings joy to the heart of man and is that precious fruit which resists the year and tear of time, which unites generations and makes them share things in admiration.
Men shrink less from offending one who inspires love than one who inspires fear.
The cost of a thing is what I call life which has to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
Mountains have the power to call us into their realms and there, left forever, are our friends whose great souls were longing for the heights. Do not forget the mountaineers who have not returned from the summits.
To the scientist, nature is always and merely a 'phenomenon,' not in the sense of being defective in reality, but in the sense of being a spectacle presented to his intelligent observation; whereas the events of history are never mere phenomena, never mere spectacles for contemplation, but things which the historian looks, not at, but through, to discern the thought within them.
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