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

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

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 Quote

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

I know of no better name than Anarchism.
- Herbert Read Quote

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

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 Quote

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 Quote

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

Nobody seriously believes in the social philosophies of the immediate past.
- Herbert Read Quote

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 Quote

Progress is measured by the degree of differentiation within a society.
- Herbert Read Quote

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 Quote

The farther a society progresses, the more clearly the individual becomes the antithesis of the group.
- Herbert Read Quote

The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol.
- Herbert Read Quote

The most general law in nature is equity-the principle of balance and symmetry which guides the growth of forms along the lines of the greatest structural efficiency.
- Herbert Read Quote

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 Quote

The sense of historical continuity, and a feeling for philosophical rectitude cannot, however, be compromised.
- Herbert Read Quote

The slave may be happy, but happiness is not enough.
- Herbert Read Quote

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 Quote

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.
- Herbert Read Quote

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 Quote

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.
- Herbert Read Quote

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.
- Herbert Read Quote

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