Herbert Spencer Quotes
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Truth generally lies in the coordination of antagonistic opinions.
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All socialism involves slavery.
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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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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 wise man must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future.
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Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.
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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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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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Every unpunished delinquency has a family of delinquencies.
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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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Objects we ardently pursue bring little happiness when gained; most of our pleasures come from unexpected sources.
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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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The idea of disembodied spirits is wholly unsupported by evidence, and I cannot accept it.
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When a man's knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion.
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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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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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Noiseless falls the foot of time That only treads on flowers.
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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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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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The greatest of all infidelities is the fear that the truth will be bad.
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Liberty is not the right of one, but of all.
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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.