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

Art is pattern informed by sensibility.
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

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

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.
Herbert Read

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.
Herbert Read

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

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

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

I know of no better name than Anarchism.
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

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

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.
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

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

Man is everywhere still in chains.
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

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