Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, and sociologist famous for his theory of social Darwinism whereby superior physical force shapes history.
Spencer is best known as the originator of the expression “survival of the fittest”, which he coined in Principles of Biology (1864) after reading Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The term strongly suggests natural selection, yet Spencer saw evolution as extending into realms of sociology and ethics, so he also supported Lamarckism.
Spencer influenced literature in as much as many novelists and short story authors came to address his ideas in their work. Spencer was referenced by George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Machado de Assis, Thomas Hardy, Bolesław Prus, George Bernard Shaw, Abraham Cahan, Richard Austin Freeman, D. H. Lawrence, and Jorge Luis Borges. Arnold Bennett greatly praised First Principles, and the influence it had on Bennett may be seen in his many novels. Jack London went so far as to create a character, Martin Eden, a staunch Spencerian. (via Wikipedia)
Following are a few great quotes by Herbert Spencer:
On Love:
Love is life’s end, but never ending. Love is life’s wealth, never spent, but ever spending. Love’s life’s reward, rewarded in rewarding.
On Life:
People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal.
On Knowledge:
When a man’s knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion.
The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
Science is organized knowledge.
Education has for its object the formation of character.
On Happiness:
No one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.
We too often forget that not only is there ‘a soul of goodness in things evil,’ but very generally also, a soul of truth in things erroneous.
The forces which are working out the great scheme of perfect happiness, taking no account of incidental suffering, exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their way, with the same sternness that they exterminate beasts of prey and herds of useless ruminants.
On Science:
If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.
Science is organized knowledge.
Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.
Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all.