Herbert Spencer Quotes
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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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During human progress, every science is evolved out of its corresponding art.
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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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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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Education has for its object the formation of character.
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Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.
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There is no origin for the idea of an afterlife, save the conclusion which the savage draws from the notion suggested by dreams.
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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 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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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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Divine right of kings means the divine right of anyone who can get uppermost.
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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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People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal.
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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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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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In societies of low civilization, there is no money.
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Education is preparation to live completely.
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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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The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.
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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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Mental power cannot be got from ill-fed brains.
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Truth generally lies in the coordination of antagonistic opinions.
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Ethical ideas and sentiments have to be considered as parts of the phenomena of life at large. We have to deal with man as a product of evolution, with society as a product of evolution, and with moral phenomena as products of evolution.
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The primary use of knowledge is for such guidance of conduct under all circumstances as shall make living complete. All other uses of knowledge are secondary.