Quotations by Author

Herbert Read

Art is pattern informed by sensibility.

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

Freud has shown one thing very clearly: that we only forget our infancy by burying it in the unconscious; and that the problems of this difficult period find their solution under a disguised form in adult life.

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.

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

In the evolution of mankind there has always been a certain degree of social coherence.

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.

Man is everywhere still in chains.

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.

The future unit is the individual, a world in himself, self-contained and self-creative, freely giving and freely receiving, but essentially a free spirit.

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.

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.