Herbert Spencer Quotes
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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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This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.
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In societies of low civilization, there is no money.
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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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Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.
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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.
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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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Without painting, sculpture, music, poetry, and the emotions produced by natural beauty of every kind, life would lose half its charm.
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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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Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.
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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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Do not try to produce an ideal child, it would find no fitness in this world.
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Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror.
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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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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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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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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 unpunished delinquency has a family of delinquencies.
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All socialism involves slavery.
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The greatest of all infidelities is the fear that the truth will be bad.
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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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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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Education has for its object the formation of character.
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During human progress, every science is evolved out of its corresponding art.