Quotes from Alexander Herzen

Everything in Italy that is particularly elegant and grand borders upon insanity and absurdity or at least is reminiscent of childhood.

You can no more bridle passions with logic than you can justify them in the law courts. Passions are facts and not dogmas.

Liberalism, austere in political trifles, has learned ever more artfully to unite a constant protest against the government with a constant submission to it.

History is the autobiography of a madman.

Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit. This is the fine point on which all legal professions of history have based their job security.

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.

What breadth, what beauty and power of human nature and development there must be in a woman to get over all the palisades, all the fences, within which she is held captive!

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.

No one is to blame. It is neither their fault nor ours. It is the misfortune of being born when a whole world is dying.

People who have realized that this is a dream imagine that it is easy to wake up, and are angry with those who continue sleeping, not considering that the whole world that environs them does not permit them to wake. Life proceeds as a series of optical illusions, artificial needs and imaginary sensations.

Science, which cuts its way through the muddy pond of daily life without mingling with it, casts its wealth to right and left, but the puny boatmen do not know how to fish for it.

This socialism will develop in all its phases until it reaches its own extremes and absurdities. Then once again a cry of denial will break from the titanic chest of the revolutionary minority and again a mortal struggle will begin, in which socialism will play the role of contemporary conservatism and will be overwhelmed in the subsequent revolution, as yet unknown to us.

We could hardly believe that after so many ordeals, after all the trials of modern skepticism, there was still so much left in our souls to destroy.

We have wasted our spirit in the regions of the abstract and general just as the monks let it wither in the world of prayer and contemplation.

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It is possible to lead astray an entire generation, to strike it blind, to drive it insane, to direct it towards a false goal. Napoleon proved this.

Compassionate love may be strong. It sobs, it burns, then it wipes away its tears – and it does nothing.

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

History is the autobiography of a madman.

I believe in nothing here, except a handful of people, a few ideas, and the fact that one cannot arrest movement.

In general modern man has no solutions

There is nothing in the world more stubborn than a corpse: you can hit it, you can knock it to pieces, but you cannot convince it.

What breadth, what beauty and power of human nature and development there must be in a woman to get over all palisades, all fences, within which she is held captive!

Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live.