Herbert Read - Quotations and Excerpts

Quotations and Excerpts

• "Art is an attempt to create pleasing forms."

• "Theirs is the hollow victory. They are deceived.
  But you my brother and my ghost, if you can go
  Knowing that there is no reward, no certain use
  In all your sacrifice, then honour is reprieved.
  To fight without hope is to fight with grace,
  The self reconstructed, the false heart repaired."
  • To a Conscript of 1940

From To Hell with Culture:

• "It is of the essence of genius to be uncommitted to any abstraction."

• "A democracy does not despise or suppress that faculty which the totalitarian socialist makes so elusive – his thinking or rational faculty. The libertarian socialist must also plan, but his plans, apart from being tentative and experimental, will make the widest use of all human faculties."

• "The libertarian planner must also remember that cities are built for citizens, and the houses and buildings will be inhabited, not by ciphers, but by human beings with sensations and feelings, and that these human beings will be unhappy unless they can freely express themselves in their environment."

• "For it is upon personal happiness that society ultimately and collectively depends."

From Poetry and Anarchism:

• "In order to create it is necessary to destroy; and the agent of destruction in society is the poet. I believe that the poet is necessarily an anarchist, and that he must oppose all organized conceptions of the State, not only those which we inherit from the past, but equally those which are imposed on people in the name of the future."