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Alexander Herzen Quotes

1812–1870 Russia

Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen [Алекса́ндр Ива́нович Ге́рцен] (April 6 1812 – January 21 1870) was a Russian writer and thinker known as the "father of Russian socialism" and one of the main fathers of agrarian populism (being an ideological ancestor of the Narodniki, Socialist-Revolutionaries, Trudoviks and the agrarian American Populist Party). With his writings, many composed while exiled in London, he attempted to influence the situation in Russia, contributing to a political climate that led to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861.

Russia
Aristocrats
Autobiographers
Exiles
Memoirists

Also known as: Aleksandr Herzen, Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen

Random Alexander Herzen quote

7 quotes

Socialism and rationalism are to this day the touchstones of humanity, the rocks which lie in the course of revolution and science.

My Past and Thoughts (1852)

The peasants will be emancipated if there is a future for Rus and for the Slavic world.

I have a sincere pity for any nation where old heads grow on young shoulders; youth is a matter, not only of years, but of temperament.

My Past and Thoughts (1852)

An empire that cannot distance itself from such a gruesome sin that so deeply affects its internal structure does not have the right to education, to future development and participation in history.

Without equality there can be no real marriage. The wife who is excluded from all the interests that occupy her husband, who is alien to them and does not share them, may be a concubine, a housekeeper, a nurse, but not a wife in the full, honourable sense of the word.

My Past and Thoughts (1852)

A religion of life had come to replace a religion of penance and emaciation, of fasting and prayer. The crucified body had risen in its turn and was no longer abashed Man had reached a harmonious unity: he had discovered that he is a single being not made, like a pendulum, of two different metals,= that check each other; he realised that the foe in his members had ceased to exist.

My Past and Thoughts (1852)

Personal freedom is a magnificent thing; by it and by it alone can a nation achieve its true freedom. Man must respect and honor his freedom in himself no less than in his neighbor or in the people at large.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Alexander Herzen (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.