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

Categorized in : People Sleep Dream

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

human-nature development fence

History is the autobiography of a madman.

Alexander Herzen

autobiography madmen

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

teaching mean lying

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

atheism insane goal

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

Alexander Herzen

live-life life thinking

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

political simple religious

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

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

libertarian liberty people

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

venice genius cities

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

stubborn pieces world

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

cutting science way

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

names war ideas

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 feelings men

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

growing-up children thinking

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

Alexander Herzen

freedom lying people

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

Alexander Herzen

tears eye men

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

submission political government

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

Alexander Herzen

believe people ideas

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

roles struggle play

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

Alexander Herzen

mask existence reason