Herbert Spencer Quotes
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The idea of disembodied spirits is wholly unsupported by evidence, and I cannot accept it.
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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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The universal basis of co-operation is the proportioning of benefits received to services rendered.
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All evil results from the non-adaptation of constitution to conditions. This is true of everything that lives. Does a shrub dwindle in poor soil, or become sickly when deprived of light, or die outright if removed to a cold climate? it is because the harmony between its organization and its circumstances has been destroyed.
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Mental power cannot be got from ill-fed brains.
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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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During human progress, every science is evolved out of its corresponding art.
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Religion has been compelled by science to give up one after another of its dogmas. . . .
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What, then, do they want a government for? Not to regulate commerce; not to educate the people; not to teach religion, not to administer charity; not to make roads and railways; but simply to defend the natural rights of man -- to protect person and property -- to prevent the aggressions of the powerful upon the weak -- in a word, to administer justice. This is the natural, the original, office of a government. It was not intended to do less: it ought not to be allowed to do more.
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Do not try to produce an ideal child, it would find no fitness in this world.
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In societies of low civilization, there is no money.
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The presumption that any current opinion is not wholly false, gains in strength according to the number of its adherents.
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Government is essentially immoral.
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The preservation of health is a duty. Few seem conscious that there is such a thing as physical morality.
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Surely in much talk there cannot choose but be much vanity. Loquacity is the fistula of the mind,--ever-running and almost incurable, let every man, therefore, be a Phocion or Pythagorean, to speak briefly to the point or not at all; let him labor like them of Crete, to show more wit in his discourse than words, and not to pour out of his mouth a flood of the one, when he can hardly wring out of his brains a drop of the other.
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A man's liberties are none the less aggressed upon because those who coerce him do so in the belief that he will be benefited.
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Evil perpetually tends to disappear.
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Education is preparation to live completely.
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Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.
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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 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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Thus poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially impressive partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech, and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances of excitement.
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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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The greatest of all infidelities is the fear that the truth will be bad.