Herbert Spencer Quotes
-
There is a story of some mountains of salt in Cumana, which never diminished, though carried away in much abundance by merchants; but when once they were monopolized to the benefit of a private purse, then the salt decreased; till afterward all were allowed to take of it, when it had a new access and increase. The truth of this story may be uncertain, but the application is true; he that envies others the use of his gifts decays then, but he thrives most that is most diffusive.
-
Organs, faculties, powers, capacities, or whatever else we call them; grow by use and diminish from disuse, it is inferred that they will continue to do so. And if this inference is unquestionable, then is the one above deduced from it-that humanity must in the end become completely adapted to its conditions-unquestionable also. Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity.
-
Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.
-
Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.
-
Without painting, sculpture, music, poetry, and the emotions produced by natural beauty of every kind, life would lose half its charm.
-
Time: That which man is always trying to kill, but which ends in killing him.
-
Pervading all nature we may see at work a stern discipline , which is a little cruel that it may be very kind.
-
Government is essentially immoral. The State employs evil weapons to subjugate evil, and is alike contaminated by the objects with which it deals, and the means by which it works.
-
Education has for its object the formation of character.
-
If there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order. So that even were the order intrinsically indifferent, it would facilitate education to lead the individual mind through the steps traversed by the general mind. But the order is not intrinsically indifferent; and hence the fundamental reason why education should be a repetition of civilization in little.
-
There is no origin for the idea of an afterlife, save the conclusion which the savage draws from the notion suggested by dreams.
-
Rightness expresses of actions, what straightness does of lines; and there can no more be two kinds of right action than there can be two kinds of straight lines.
-
Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror.
-
Conservatism defends those coercive arrangements which a still-lingering savageness makes requisite. Radicalism endeavours to realize a state more in harmony with the character of the ideal man.
-
People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal.
-
Every pleasure raises the tide of life; every pain lowers the tide of life.
-
If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making?
-
The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many "in shallows and in miseries," are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence.
-
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.
-
We do not commonly see in a tax a diminution of freedom, and yet it clearly is one.
-
Divine right of kings means the divine right of anyone who can get uppermost.
-
Every unpunished delinquency has a family of delinquencies.
-
Mental power cannot be got from ill-fed brains.
-
And yet, strange to say, now that this truth is recognized by most cultivated people — now that the beneficent working of the survival of the fittest has been so impressed on them that, much more than people in past times, they might be expected to hesitate before neutralizing its action — now more than ever before in the history of the world, are they doing all they can to further survival of the unfittest!