Herbert Spencer Quotes
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We all decry prejudice, yet are all prejudiced.
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There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance-that principle is contempt prior to investigation.
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Time: That which man is always trying to kill, but which ends in killing him.
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The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.
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Do not try to produce an ideal child, it would find no fitness in this world.
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The child takes most of his nature of the mother, besides speech, manners, and inclination.
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The freest form of government is only the least objectionable form. The rule of the many by the few we call tyranny: the rule of the few by the many is tyranny also; only of a less intense kind.
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The wise man must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future.
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Progress is not an accident, not a thing within human control, but a beneficent necessity ... due to the working of a universal law. So surely must the things we call evil and immorality disappear; so surely must man become perfect.
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It becomes possible to admit that plainness may coexist with nobility of nature, and fine features with baseness; and yet to hold that mental and physical perfection are fundamentally connected, and will, when the present causes of incongruity have worked themselves out, be ever found united.
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It must be admitted that the conception of virtue cannot be separated from the conception of happiness-producing conduct.
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Of all the knowledge, that most worth having is knowledge about health! The first requisite of a good life is to be a healthy person.
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Is it stupidity or is it moral cowardice which leads men to continue professing a creed that makes self-sacrifice a cardinal principle, while they urge the sacrificing of others, even to the death, when they trespass against us? Is it blindness, or is it an insance inconsistency, which makes them regard as most admirable the bearing of evil for the benefit of others, while they lavish admiration on those who, out of revenge, inflict great evils in return for small ones suffered? Surely our barbarian code of right needs revision, and our barbarian standard of honour should be somewhat changed.
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No philosopher's stone of a constitution can produce golden conduct from leaden instincts.
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Be it or be it not true that Man is shapen in iniquity and conceived in sin, it is unquestionably true that Government is begotten of aggression, and by aggression.
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Truth generally lies in the coordination of antagonistic opinions.
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Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory it supported by no facts at all.
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Education has for its object 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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No phrase can convey the idea of surprise so vividly as opening the eyes and raising the eyebrows. A shrug of the shoulders would lose much by translation into words.
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In science the important thing is to modify and change one's ideas as science advances.
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For what is meant by saying that a government ought to educate the people? Why should they be educated? What is the education for? Clearly, to fit the people for social life - to make them good citizens. And who is to say what are good citizens? The government: there is no other judge. And who is to say how these good citizens may be made? The government: there is no other judge. Hence the proposition is convertible into this - a government ought to mold children into good citizens, using its own discretion in settling what a good citizen is and how the child may be molded into one.
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The present relationship existing between husband and wife, where one claims a command over the actions of the other, is nothing more than a remnant of the old leaven of slavery. It is necessarily destructive of refined love; for how can a man continue to regard as his type of the ideal a being whom he has, be denying an equality of privilege with himself, degraded to something below himself?
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Feudalism, serfdom, slavery — all tyrannical institutions, are merely the most vigorous kinds of rule, springing out of, and necessary to, a bad state of man. The progress from these is in all cases the same — less government.
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Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.