Herbert Read Quotes

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Herbert Read

Profession : Poet

Birth : December 4, 1893

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.

Herbert Read

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.

Herbert Read

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

Herbert Read

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.

Herbert Read

The slave may be happy, but happiness is not enough.

Herbert Read

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

Herbert Read

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.

Herbert Read

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.

Herbert Read

The farther a society progresses, the more clearly the individual becomes the antithesis of the group.

Herbert Read

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

Herbert Read

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.

Herbert Read

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

Herbert Read

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

Herbert Read

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.

Herbert Read

The principle of equity first came into evidence in Roman jurisprudence and was derived by analogy from the physical meaning of the word.

Herbert Read

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

Herbert Read

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.

Herbert Read

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.

Herbert Read