93 Quotes by Herbert Read

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.