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Herbert Read Quotes


A man of personality can formulate ideals, but only a man of character can achieve them.

Art is pattern informed by sensibility.

But the further step, by means of which a civilization is given its quality or culture, is only attained by a process of cellular division, in the course of which the individual is differentiated, made distinct from and independent of the parent group.

Creeds and castes, and all forms of intellectual and emotional grouping, belong to the past.

Freud has shown one thing very clearly: that we only forget our infancy by burying it in the unconscious; and that the problems of this difficult period find their solution under a disguised form in adult life.

I am not going to claim that modern anarchism has any direct relation to Roman jurisprudence; but I do claim that it has its basis in the laws of nature rather than in the state of nature.

I call religion a natural authority, but it has usually been conceived as a supernatural authority.

I can imagine no society which does not embody some method of arbitration.

I have not the slightest doubt that this form of individuation represents a higher stage in the evolution of mankind.

I know of no better name than Anarchism.

If the individual is a unit in a corporate mass, his life is not merely brutish and short, but dull and mechanical.

In the evolution of mankind there has always been a certain degree of social coherence.

It does not seem that the contradiction which exists between the aristocratic function of art and the democratic structure of modern society can ever be resolved.

It is already clear, after twenty years of socialism in Russia, that if you do not provide your society with a new religion, it will gradually revert to the old one.

It was Nietzsche who first made us conscious of the significance of the individual as a term in the evolutionary process-in that part of the evolutionary process which has still to take place.

Man is everywhere still in chains.

Morality, as has often been pointed out, is antecedent to religion-it even exists in a rudimentary form among animals.

My own early experiences in war led me to suspect the value of discipline, even in that sphere where it is so often regarded as the first essential for success.

Nobody seriously believes in the social philosophies of the immediate past.

Progress is measured by richness and intensity of experience - by a wider and deeper apprehension of the significance and scope of human existence.