In History, stagnant waters, whether they be stagnant waters of custom or those of despotism, harbour no life; life is dependent on the ripples created by a few eccentric individuals. In homage to that life and vitality, the community has to brave certain perils and must countenance a measure of heresy. One must live dangerously if one wants to live at all.

This work both changed fundamentally his own life’s work throughout his remaining twenty-five years and provided art education with a rationale of unprecedented lucidity and persuasiveness. Read perhaps was the closest England came to an existentialist theorist of the European tradition. ) Herbert Read Reassessed (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 1998)
King James The Last Modern: A Life of Herbert Read (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1990)
Paraskos Michael (ed.

Sir Herbert Edward Read DSO MC (1893–1968) was an English anarchist poet and critic of literature and art.