Category: Herbert Read

The assumption is that the right kind of society is an organic being not merely analogous to an organic being, but actually a living structure with appetites and digestions, instincts and passions, intelligence and reason.

What I do deny is that you can build any enduring society without some such mystical ethos.

It is already clear, after twenty years of socialism in Russia, that if you do not provide your society with a new religion, it will gradually revert to the old one.

I can imagine no society which does not embody some method of arbitration.

The farther a society progresses, the more clearly the individual becomes the antithesis of the group.

It does not seem that the contradiction which exists between the aristocratic function of art and the democratic structure of modern society can ever be resolved.

Progress is measured by the degree of differentiation within a society.

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.