Quotes by Herbert Read

• Progress is measured by the degree of differentiation within a society.
• These groups within a society can he distinguished according as to whether, like an army or an orchestra, they function as a single body; or whether they are united merely to defend their common interests and otherwise function as separate individuals.
• The point I am making is that in the more primitive forms of society the individual is merely a unit; in more developed forms of society he is an independent personality.
• The assumption is that the right kind of society is an organic being not merely analogous to an organic being, but actually a living structure with appetites and digestions, instincts and passions, intelligence and reason.
• The characteristic political attitude of today is not one of positive belief, but of despair.
• The farther a society progresses, the more clearly the individual becomes the antithesis of the group.
• The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol.
• The most general law in nature is equity-the principle of balance and symmetry which guides the growth of forms along the lines of the greatest structural efficiency.
• The only sin is ugliness, and if we believed this with all our being, all other activities of the human spirit could be left to take care of themselves.
• The principle of equity first came into evidence in Roman jurisprudence and was derived by analogy from the physical meaning of the word.
• The sense of historical continuity, and a feeling for philosophical rectitude cannot, however, be compromised.
• The sensitive artist knows that a bitter wind is blowing.
• The slave may be happy, but happiness is not enough.
• There are a few people, but a diminishing number, who still believe that Marxism, as an economic system, off era a coherent alternative to capitalism, and socialism has, indeed, triumphed in one country.
• Progress is measured by richness and intensity of experience - by a wider and deeper apprehension of the significance and scope of human existence.
• To realize that new world we must prefer the values of freedom and equality above all other values - above personal wealth, technical power and nationalism.
• We may be sure that out of the ruins of our capitalist civilization a new religion will emerge, just as Christianity emerged from the ruins of the Roman civilization.
• What I do deny is that you can build any enduring society without some such mystical ethos.
• You might think that it would he the natural desire of every man to develop as an independent personality, but this does not seem to be true.
• The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material wealth or military power, but by the quality and achievements of its representative individuals - its philosophers, its poets and its artists.
• Creeds and castes, and all forms of intellectual and emotional grouping, belong to the past.
• A man of personality can formulate ideals, but only a man of character can achieve them.
• That is why I believe that art is so much more significant than either economics or philosophy. It is the direct measure of man's spiritual vision.
• 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.
• Nobody seriously believes in the social philosophies of the immediate 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.
• 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.
• I know of no better name than Anarchism.
• Art is pattern informed by sensibility.