Herbert Spencer Quotes
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What a cage is to the wild beast, law is to the selfish man.
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The society exists for the benefit of its members; not its members for the benefit of the society.
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A living thing is distinguished from a dead thing by the multiplicity of the changes at any moment taking place in it.
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Whatever fosters militarism makes for barbarism; whatever fosters peace makes for civilization.
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Be bold, be bold, and everywhere be bold.
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The belief, not only of the socialist but of those so-called liberals who are diligently preparing the way for them is that by due skill an ill working humanity may be framed into well-working initiations. It is delusion. The defective natures of citizens will show themselves in bad acting of whatever social structure they are arranged into. There is no political alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of laden instincts.
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The law is the survival of the fittest.... The law is not the survival of the 'better' or the 'stronger,' if we give to those words any thing like their ordinary meanings. It is the survival of those which are constitutionally fittest to thrive under the conditions in which they are placed; and very often that which, humanly speaking, is inferiority, causes the survival.
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Education has for its object the formation of character. To curb restive propensities, to awaken dormant sentiments, to strengthen the perceptions, and cultivate the tastes, to encourage this feeling and repress that, so as finally to develop the child into a man of well proportioned and harmonious nature, this is alike the aim of parent and teacher.
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Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.
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Equity knows no difference of sex. In its vocabulary the word man must be understood in a generic, and not in a specific sense.
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However insignificant the minority, and however trifling the proposed trespass against their rights, no such trespass is permissible.
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A function to each organ, and each organ to its own function, is the law of all organization.
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It is a commonly observed fact that the enslavement of women is invariably associated with a low type of social life, and that, conversely, her elevation towards an equality with man uniformly accompanies progress.
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I had a great dislike to the annoyances entailed by baggage; and it was always with some feeling of elation that I cut myself free from everything but what I could carry about me. Like children, portmanteaus and trunks are hostages to fortune.
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People ... become so preoccupied with the means by which an end is achieved, as eventually to mistake it for the end. Just as money, which is a means of satisfying wants, comes to be regarded by a miser as the sole thing to be worked for, leaving the wants unsatisfied; so the conduct men have found preferable because most conducive to happiness, has come to be thought of as intrinsically preferable: not only to be made a proximate end (which it should be), but to be made an ultimate end, to the exclusion of the true ultimate end.
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Sundry manifestations of nature in men and women, are greatly perverted by existing social conventions upheld by both. There are feelings which, under our predatory régime, with its adapted standard of propriety, it is not considered manly to show; but which, contrariwise, are considered admirable in women. Hence repressed manifestations in the one case, and exaggerated manifestations in the other; leading to mistaken estimates.
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Agnostics are people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of matters, about which metaphysicians and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatize with the utmost confidence.
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The essential trait in the moral consciousness, is the control of some feeling or feelings by some other feeling or feelings.
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The white light of truth, in traversing the many sided transparent soul of the poet, is refracted into iris-hued poetry.
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Policeman are soldiers who act alone; soldiers are policeman who act in unison.
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Practical atheism, seeing no guidance for human affairs but its own limited foresight, endeavors itself to play the god, and decide what will be good for mankind and what bad.
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With a higher moral nature will come a restriction on the multiplication of the inferior.
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It cannot but happen?that those will survive whose functions happen to be most nearly in equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces? This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.
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How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.