Herbert Read Quotes

Society is now one polished horde, formed of two mighty tries, the Bores and Bored.

It's true: one of the things that I've always thought about American society is that you never get the sort of natural politicisation of class consciousness that you would get in the United Kingdom or even in Australia.

The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.

There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria.

It is an ugly name, that of "The Masses," for the great majority of human beings in a nation.

Surely there is something unlovely, to modern as against medieval minds, about marked inequality of either kind income or power.

When we consider the close connection between science and industrial development on the one hand, and between literary and aesthetic cultivation and an aristocratic social organization on the other, we get light on the opposition between technical scientific studies and refining literary studies. We have before us the need of overcoming this separation in education if society is to be truly democratic.

Science of Society

A poor man is a man who has not got much money. This may seem a simple and unnecessary description, but in the face of a great mass of modern fact and fiction, it seems very necessary indeed; most of our realists and sociologists talk about a poor man as if he were an octopus or an alligator.

We are undemocratic, then, in our religion, as is proved by our efforts to “raise” the poor.

The Privileged and the People form Two Nations.

Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones or inhabitants of different planets ... the rich and the poor.

If you have more rich people and more poor people and fewer people in the middle, what you lose is democracy.

What the poor did to the poor was the business of the poor, not the business of the proper people who ran the city.

That system, unequal as it is indefensible, is the mightiest engine of oppression imposed upon an honest yeomanry since the feudal ages. This system places a high premium on wealth and a severe penalty on poverty.

Allow the rich (no matter under what pretext, whether of philanthropy, or patriotism, or interest) to prescribe the education of the poor, and they prescribe their condition and relative importance.

We have two American flags always; one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it, it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it, it means danger, revolution.

There are no great lords who possess everything and a herd of people who have nothing

A premodern society, a preindustrial society, is one where people wake up whenever they want, there’s a lot of work but that isn’t set off from leisure…. A modern society is one where the bells ring at a certain time and we move from one place to another and people just become parts of a machine which has a very well thought out, pre-thought out way of working.

one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all.

You can have class in the ghetto and trash in the White House.

Oh, the poor folks hate the rich folks, And the rich folks hate the poor folks. All of my folks hate all of your folks, It's American as apple pie.

The ignorance of the working class and the superior intelligence of the privileged class are superstitions fostered by ... universities and churches, and by all the centers of privilege.

Society is one word, but many things.

An elite has prospered with our kinds of institutions, but the same cannot be said of the masses.