Alexander Herzen Quotes

Quotes about:

• History is the autobiography of a madman.

  Alexander Herzen

  Madmen, Autobiography

  44 Copy quote

• Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live.

  Alexander Herzen

  Life, Live Life, Thinking

  27 Copy quote

• What breadth, what beauty and power of human nature and development there must be in a woman to get over all the palisades, all the fences, within which she is held captive!

  Alexander Herzen

  Development, Human Nature, Fence

  50 Copy quote

• The world will not know liberty until all that is religious and political is transformed into something simple and human and made susceptible to criticism and denial.

  Alexander Herzen

  Religious, Simple, Political

  22 Copy quote

• It is possible to lead astray an entire generation, to strike it blind, to drive it insane, to direct it towards a false goal. Napoleon proved this.

  Alexander Herzen

  Goal, Atheism, Insane

  26 Copy quote

• The Death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.

  Alexander Herzen

  Night, Order, Long

  25 Copy quote

• Science even more than the Gospel teaches us humility. She cannot look down on anything, she does not know what superiority means, she despises nothing, never lies for the sake of a pose, and conceals nothing out of coquetry. She stops before the facts as an investigator, sometimes as a physician, never as an executioner, and still less with hostility and irony.

  Alexander Herzen

  Lying, Teaching, Mean

  36 Copy quote

• The liberty of the individual is the greatest thing of all, it is on this and this alone that the true will of the people can develop.

  Alexander Herzen

  People, Liberty, Libertarian

  27 Copy quote

• We think the purpose of a child is to grow up because it does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of life is death

  Alexander Herzen

  Children, Growing Up, Thinking

  14 Copy quote

• People who have realized that this is a dream imagine that it is easy to wake up, and are angry with those who continue sleeping, not considering that the whole world that environs them does not permit them to wake. Life proceeds as a series of optical illusions, artificial needs and imaginary sensations.

  Alexander Herzen

  Dream, Sleep, People

  23 Copy quote

• I am truly horrified by modern man. Such absence of feeling, such narrowness of outlook, such lack of passion and information, such feebleness of thought.

  Alexander Herzen

  Passion, Men, Feelings

  17 Copy quote

• There is nothing in the world more stubborn than a corpse: you can hit it, you can knock it to pieces, but you cannot convince it.

  Alexander Herzen

  Pieces, Stubborn, World

  28 Copy quote

• All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence, the former - of the corruption of the will.

  Alexander Herzen

  Organization, Political, Atheism

  9 Copy quote

• Science, which cuts its way through the muddy pond of daily life without mingling with it, casts its wealth to right and left, but the puny boatmen do not know how to fish for it.

  Alexander Herzen

  Science, Cutting, Way

  1855 Notebook entry, collected in Byloe i dumy (My Past and Thoughts), vol.3 (published 1861-7, translated by Constance Garnett,1924).

  21 Copy quote

• To build a city where it is impossible to build a city is madness in itself, but to build there one of the most elegant and grandest of cities is the madness of genius.

  Alexander Herzen

  Cities, Venice, Genius

  "The lost city of Venice" by Josh McHugh, www.wired.com. August 1, 2003.

  26 Copy quote

• I have served one idea, marched under one banner - war against all imposed authority - against every kind of deprivation of freedom, in the name of the absolute independence of the individual.

  Alexander Herzen

  War, Names, Ideas

  20 Copy quote

• Liberalism, austere in political trifles, has learned ever more artfully to unite a constant protest against the government with a constant submission to it.

  Alexander Herzen

  Government, Political, Submission

  20 Copy quote

• One must open men's eyes, not tear them out.

  Alexander Herzen

  Eye, Men, Tears

  11 Copy quote

• This socialism will develop in all its phases until it reaches its own extremes and absurdities. Then once again a cry of denial will break from the titanic chest of the revolutionary minority and again a mortal struggle will begin, in which socialism will play the role of contemporary conservatism and will be overwhelmed in the subsequent revolution, as yet unknown to us.

  Alexander Herzen

  Struggle, Play, Roles

  53 Copy quote

• The people is always expressive of the truth. The life of a people cannot be a lie.

  Alexander Herzen

  Freedom, Lying, People

  12 Copy quote

• False gods must be repudiated, but that is not all: The reasons for their existence must be sought beneath their masks.

  Alexander Herzen

  Reason, Mask, Existence

  11 Copy quote

• History knocks at a thousand gates at every moment, and the gatekeeper is chance. We shout into the mist for this one or that one to be opened for us, but through every gate are a thousand more. We need wit and courage to make our way while our way is making us.

  Alexander Herzen

  Needs, Way, Chance

  19 Copy quote

• I believe in nothing here, except a handful of people, a few ideas, and the fact that one cannot arrest movement.

  Alexander Herzen

  Believe, Ideas, People

  8 Copy quote

• A generation which has passed through the shop has absorbed standards and ambitions which are not of those of spaciousness, and cannot get away from them. Everything with them is done as though for sale, and they naturally have in view the greatest possible benefit, profit and that end of the stuff that will make the best show.

  Alexander Herzen

  Business, Ambition, Views

  21 Copy quote

• Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, "just in case," in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.

  Alexander Herzen

  Memories, Men, Years

  7 Copy quote

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