Herbert Spencer Quotes
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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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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.
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All socialism involves slavery.
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Aggression which is flagitious when committed by one, is not sanctioned when committed by a host.
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Those whose hardships are set forth in pamphlets and proclaimed in sermons and speeches which echo throughout society, are assumed to be all worthy souls, grievously wronged; and none of them are thought of as bearing the penalties of their misdeeds.
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The greatest of all infidelities is the fear that the truth will be bad.
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No place, no company, no age, no person is temptation-free; let no man boast that he was never tempted, let him not be high-minded, but fear, for he may be surprised in that very instant wherein he boasteth that he was never tempted at all.
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Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.
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The idea of disembodied spirits is wholly unsupported by evidence, and I cannot accept it.
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Objects we ardently pursue bring little happiness when gained; most of our pleasures come from unexpected sources.
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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.
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Divine right of kings means the divine right of anyone who can get uppermost.
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Pervading all nature we may see at work a stern discipline , which is a little cruel that it may be very kind.
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Every unpunished delinquency has a family of delinquencies.
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Music may appeal to crude and coarse feelings or to refined and noble ones; and in so far as it does the latter it awakens the higher nature and works an effect, though but a transitory effect, of a beneficial kind. But the primary purpose of music is neither instruction nor culture but pleasure; and this is an all-sufficient purpose.
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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!
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The Republican form of government is the highest form of government: but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature, a type nowhere at present existing.
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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.
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Every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with the possession of like liberties by every other man.
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There can be little question that good composition is far less dependent upon acquaintance with its laws, than upon practice and natural aptitude. A clear head, a quick imagination, and a sensitive ear, will go far towards making all rhetorical precepts needless.
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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.
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The defects of the children mirror the defects of the parents.
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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.