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"The farther a society progresses, the more clearly the individual becomes the antithesis of the group."
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"Though the earth contains greater energy and mass than any single being, linked together, "people make the world go-round"."

"Why, because an author has more rights than ordinary people, as everybody knows. People will stand much more from him."

"When a man's girlfriend's parents ask him what it is that he does for a living: they're not really concerned about him, they're concerned about their daughter's tummy."

"I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business con."

"The greater ignorance towards a country is not ignoring what its politicians have to say, it is ignoring what the inmates in its prisons have to say."

"It was masturbation, not willpower, that made it possible for gazillions of women to walk down the aisle with their reputation and their hymen still intact."

"Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I'd lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn't understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket."

"Electing a bigot enables further bigotry."

"Civilization is the commercialization of survival."

"No herd is more herd than the mass of ignorant people!"
Explore more quotes by Herbert Read

"I call religion a natural authority, but it has usually been conceived as a supernatural authority."

"The point I am making is that in the more primitive forms of society the individual is merely a unit; in more developed forms of society he is an independent personality."

"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."

"The only sin is ugliness, and if we believed this with all our being, all other activities of the human spirit could be left to take care of themselves."

"The most general law in nature is equity-the principle of balance and symmetry which guides the growth of forms along the lines of the greatest structural efficiency."

"That is why I believe that art is so much more significant than either economics or philosophy. It is the direct measure of man's spiritual vision."
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