Herzen Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Everything in Italy that is particularly elegant and grand borders upon insanity and absurdity or at least is reminiscent of childhood. — Alexander Herzen

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

We could hardly believe that after so many ordeals, after all the trials of modern skepticism, there was still so much left in our souls to destroy. — Alexander Herzen

Human development is a form of chronological unfairness, since late-comers are able to profit by the labors of their predecessors without paying the same price. — Alexander Herzen

Slavery is the first step towards civilization. In order to develop it is necessary that things should be much better for some and much worse for others, then those who are better off can develop at the expense of others. — Alexander Herzen

Herzen is terrified of the oppressors, but he is terrified of the liberators too. He is terrified of them because for him they are the secular heirs of the religious bigots of the ages of faith; because anybody who has a cut and dried scheme, a straitjacket which he wishes to impose on humanity as the sole possible remedy for all human ills, is ultimately bound to create a situation intolerable for free human beings, for men like himself who want to express themselves, who want to have some area in which to develop their own resources, and are prepared to respect the originality, the spontaneity, the natural impulse towards self-expression on the part of other human beings too. — Isaiah Berlin

Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. — Alexander Herzen

Mariela had tried to discern what love was made of, but love was not easily discipherable. It was a quickened heart, a trembling mouth, a breath, a quake, a dream. It was physical and metaphysical, territorial and saintly. It was sacrificing and jealous, maudlin and profound, well-anticipated and entirely unpredictable, and she found it in all its various guises at the end of a long loneliness that she had thought would last her lifetime. — Lane Von Herzen

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

[T]he departing world leaves behind ... not an heir, but a pregnant widow. — Alexander Herzen

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

Strong drink stupefies a man and makes it possible for him to forget; it gives him an artificial cheeriness, an artificial excitement; and the pleasure of this state is increased by the low level of civilization and the narrow empty life to which these men are confined. — Alexander Herzen

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

I first came to Russia because of the culture, literature and music ... and my interest in the 19th-century revolutionary spirit of Herzen, Bakunin and Kropotkin. Russia is a wonderful place to bring new clowns because Russians give back a wonderful response. — Patch Adams

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

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

Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit. This is the fine point on which all legal professions of history have based their job security. — Alexander Herzen

Self-reflection, the ability to make of his own deepest feelings an object which he could set before him and pay it tribute, and, in the next breath, perhaps, ridicule it, was a thing he had developed to the highest degree. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Never was Catholicism, never were the ideas of chivalry, impressed on men so deeply, so multifariously, as the bourgeois ideas. — Alexander Herzen

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

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

It must not be thought that the cowardly feeling of caution and uneasy self-preservation is innate in the English character. It is the consequence of a corpulence derived from wealth and of the training of all thoughts and passions for acquisitiveness. — Alexander Herzen

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

Unaware of the absurdity of it, we introduce our own petty household rules into the economy of the universe for which the life of generations, peoples, of entire planets, has no importance in relation to the general development. — Alexander Herzen

If nations always moved from one set of furnished rooms to another - and always into a better set - things might be easier, but the trouble is that there is no one to prepare the new rooms. The future is worse than the ocean - there is nothing there. — Alexander Herzen

One must open men's eyes, not tear them out. — Alexander Herzen

History is the autobiography of a madman. — Alexander Herzen

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

Would it be possible to stand still on one spot more majestically - while simulating a triumphant march forward - than it is done by the two English Houses of Parliament? — Alexander Herzen

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

You can no more bridle passions with logic than you can justify them in the law courts. Passions are facts and not dogmas. — Alexander Herzen

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

The people is always expressive of the truth. The life of a people cannot be a lie. — Alexander Herzen

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

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

Belinsky: 'Who is this Moloch that eats his children?'
Herzen: 'It's the Ginger Cat. — Tom Stoppard

Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live. — Alexander Herzen

Independence isn't all it's cracked up to be, you know. What country could be more independent than Russia? And in Russia now there isn't a squeak or a pinpoint of light. I have nowhere to publish. The Contemporary has stuck its head up out of harm's way. So I've stopped quarrelling with the world. I sat in this chair the first morning I woke up in this house ... and for the first time ... for a long time, there was silence. I didn't have to talk or think or move, nothing was expected of me, I knew nobody and nobody knew where i was, everything was behind me, all the moving from place to place, the quarrels and celebrations, the desperate concerns of health and happiness, love, death, printer's errors, picnics ruined by rain, the endless tumult of life ... and I just sat quiet and alone all day, looking at the tops of trees on Primrose Hill through the mist. — Tom Stoppard

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

No one is to blame. It is neither their fault nor ours. It is the misfortune of being born when a whole world is dying. — Alexander Herzen

We have wasted our spirit in the regions of the abstract and general just as the monks let it wither in the world of prayer and contemplation. — Alexander Herzen

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

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