Herbert Read

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The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material wealth or military power, but by the quality and achievements of its representative individuals - its philosophers, its poets and its artists.
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My own early experiences in war led me to suspect the value of discipline, even in that sphere where it is so often regarded as the first essential for success.
My own early experiences in war led me to suspect the value of discipline, even in that sphere where it is so often regarded as the first essential for success.
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.
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.
What I do deny is that you can build any enduring society without some such mystical ethos.
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.
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.
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.
These groups within a society can he distinguished according as to whether, like an army or an orchestra, they function as a single body or whether they are united merely to defend their common interests and otherwise function as separate individuals.

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