Herbert Read Quotes about Literature

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

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

The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol.

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.

I know of no better name than Anarchism.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

What I do deny is that you can build any enduring society without some such mystical ethos.

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

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.