Alexander Herzen Quotes

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!

History is the autobiography of a madman.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Compassionate love may be strong. It sobs, it burns, then it wipes away its tears – and it does nothing.

I believe what I write to be the truth...every man who is not indifferent to the truth has a weakness for spreading it about.

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