59 Quotes by Alexander Herzen

Science even more than the Gospel teaches us humility. She cannot look down on anything, she does not know what superiority means, she despises nothing, never lies for the sake of a pose, and conceals nothing out of coquetry. She stops before the facts as an investigator, sometimes as a physician, never as an executioner, and still less with hostility and irony.

History is the autobiography of a madman.

We think the purpose of a child is to grow up because it does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of life is death.

We are not the doctors. We are the disease.

The Russian system of justice and police is so haphazard, so inhuman, so arbitrary and corrupt, that a poor malefactor has more reason to fear his trial than his sentence. He is impatient for the time when he will be sent to Siberia; for his martyrdom comes to an end when his punishment begins.

All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence, the former – of the corruption of the will.

I have served one idea, marched under one banner – war against all imposed authority – against every kind of deprivation of freedom, in the name of the absolute independence of the individual.

You can awaken people by dreaming their dreams more clearly than they dream themselves.

One must open men’s eyes, not tear them out.