Herbert Read Quotes

I'm a natural novelist. I'm interested in the person and the group, and how they mesh. And one of the ways I don't want them to mesh is for the person to be subsumed into the group.

But the further step, by means of which a civilization is given its quality or culture, is only attained by a process of cellular division, in the course of which the individual is differentiated, made distinct from and independent of the parent group.

One other fact is significant: the domestic feasts and sacrifices of single families, which in David's time must still have been general, gradually declined and lost their importance as social circles widened and life became more public.

For traditional societies … the collective, the group, is more important than the individual, and empowering the individual is equated with dividing the society.

Growing up in inner-city neighborhoods, there's a particular structure, which I'm sure is true of most social contexts. The type of person you are determines the role you play.

The People, though we think of a great entity when we use the word, means nothing more than so many millions of individual men.

Social psychology is especially interested in the effect which the social group has in the determination of the experience and conduct of the individual member.

Being put in a group, I hate that. I don't think anyone likes it. Everyone just wants to be their own person.

Cities are just a physical manifestation of your interactions, our interactions, and the clustering and grouping of individuals.

Minds do not act together in public; they simply stick together; and when their private activities are resumed, they fly apart again.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

He who would dare to undertake to establish a nation would have to feel himself capable of altering, so to speak, human nature, to transform each individual, who by his very nature is a unique and perfect whole, into a mere part of a greater whole, from which this individual would in a sense receive his life and his being.

Individuals often exercise considerable influence upon the fate of society, but this influence is determined by the internal structure of that society and by its relation to other societies

Eagles fly alone, but sheep flock together.

Our government wasn't created to be efficient. It was created to preserve the individual.

All government and all private institutions must be designed to promote and protect and defend the integrity and the dignity of the individual. And that is the essential meaning of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

To abolish class distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself.

The stability of medieval society depended on the fixity of all of its parts, as that of modern society is on their mobility.

The individual is greater than the state.

Any organized social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is "flat" and in which all members are equal.

Most of us are a lot more comfortable thinking about and writing about individuals than institutions.

Under the old social regime, social position had been absolute: born a peasant, died a peasant; born a chieftain, died a chieftain. In the new world, everything was relative. The only real measure of a man’s worth was money — and the accumulation of money has no intrinsic limits.

our society -- unlike most in the world -- presupposes that freedom and liberty are in a frame of reference that makes the individual, not government, the keeper of his tastes, beliefs, and ideas.

People are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively.

Just as the earth is a planet in its own right, so each of us is an individual in our own sphere of habitation. We are individuals, but we live in families and communities where order provides a system of harmony that hinges on obedience to principles.