Skip to content

These are the sensations and feelings that are gradually blunted by education, staled by custom, rejected in favor of social conformity.

— Herbert Read Collected Poems (1966)

Another quote →

Topics

Society

More quotes by Herbert Read

All revolutions in modern times, Camus points out, have led to a reinforcement of the power of the State.

Foreword (1956)

The work of art … is an instrument for tilling the human psyche, that it may continue to yield a harvest of vital beauty.

Collected Poems (1966)

Restraint is not the contrary of revolt.

Foreword (1956)

True poetry is never speech but always a song.

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.

Poetry and Anarchism (1938)

All Herbert Read quotes →

You may also like

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

One country, one constitution, one destiny.

Daniel Webster

Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Herbert Read (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.