Herbert Spencer Quotes
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No one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.
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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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Every cause produces more than one effect.
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Only when Genius is married to Science can the highest results be produced.
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The tyrant is nothing but a slave turned inside out.
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The existence of a first cause of the universe is a necessity of thought ... Amid the mysteries which become more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty that we are over in the presence of an Infinite, Eternal Energy from which all things proceed.
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In societies of low civilization, there is no money.
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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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Under the natural course of things each citizen tends towards his fittest function. Those who are competent to the kind of work they undertake, succeed, and, in the average of cases, are advanced in proportion to their efficiency; while the incompetent, society soon finds out, ceases to employ, forces to try something easier, and eventually turns to use.
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Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.
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If every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man, then he is free to drop connection with the state-to relinquish its protection, and to refuse paying toward its support.
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An argument fatal to the communist theory, is suggested by the fact, that a desire for property is one of the elements of our nature.
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A nation's institutions and beliefs are determined by it's character.
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Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.
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Government is essentially immoral.
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Each new ontological theory, propounded in lieu of previous ones shown to be untenable, has been followed by a new criticism leading to a new scepticism. All possible conceptions have been one by one tried and found wanting; and so the entire field of speculation has been gradually exhausted without positive result: the only result reached being the negative one above stated, that the reality existing behind all appearances is, and must ever be, unknown.
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Marriage: A word which should be pronounced "mirage".
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All socialism involves slavery. That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labours under coercion to satisfy anothers desires.
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We have a priori reasons for believing that in every sentence there is some one order of words more effective than any other; and that this order is the one which presents the elements of the proposition in the succession in which they may be most readily put together.
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All socialism involves slavery.
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Much dearer be the things which come through hard distress.
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This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.
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That feelings of love and hate make rational judgments impossible in public affairs, as in private affairs, we can clearly enough see in others, though not so clearly in ourselves.
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The question of questions for the politicians should ever be-What type of social structure am I tending to produce? But this is a question he never entertains.