Quotes from Herbert Read

The slave may be happy, but happiness is not enough.

Art is pattern informed by sensibility.

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

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

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

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.

The great modern heresy in poetry is to confuse the use we make of words in a poem with modalities of speech...For true poetry is never speech but always a song.

The characteristic political attitude of today is not one of positive belief, but of despair.

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

The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

That is why I believe that art is so much more significant than either economics or philosophy. It is the direct measure of man's spiritual vision.

Progress is measured by richness and intensity of experience - by a wider and deeper apprehension of the significance and scope of human existence.

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.

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.

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

The sensitive artist knows that a bitter wind is blowing.

Progress is measured by the degree of differentiation within a society.

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.

The principle of equity first came into evidence in Roman jurisprudence and was derived by analogy from the physical meaning of the word.