Herbert Spencer Quotes (60 Quotes)

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.

Conservatism defends those coercive arrangements which a still-lingering savageness makes requisite. Radicalism endeavours to realize a state more in harmony with the character of the ideal man.

The behavior of men to the lower animals, and their behavior to each other, bear a constant relationship.

Marriage: A word which should be pronounced "mirage".

Education has for its object the formation of character.

Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror.

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.

Rightness expresses of actions, what straightness does of lines and there can no more be two kinds of right action than there can be two kinds of straight lines.

All socialism involves slavery.

In science the important thing is to modify and change one's ideas as science advances.

Life is the continuous adjustment of external relations.

No one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.

Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.

What a cage is to the wild beast, law is to the selfish man.

The more specific idea of Evolution now reached is - a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.

Time That which man is always trying to kill, but which ends in killing him.

This survival of the fittest which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called 'natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.'

The wise man must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future.

Or it needs only to look back over past centuries and the iniquities alike of populace, nobles, kings, and popes to perceive an almost incomprehensible futility of the beliefs everywhere held and perpetually insisted upon.

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.

When a man's knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion.

Absolute morality is the regulation of conduct in such a way that pain shall not be inflicted.

People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal.

Whatever foster militarism makes for barbarism whatever fosters peace makes for civilization.

The most important attribute of man as a moral being is the faculty of self-control.

Every cause produces more than one effect.

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, farseeing be

The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.

A living thing is distinguished from a dead thing by the multiplicity of the changes at any moment taking place in it.

The fact disclosed by a survey of the past that majorities have been wrong must not blind us to the complementary fact that majorities have usually not been entirely wrong.

Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts - as the one which, more than any other, ministers to the human spirit.

We do not commonly see in a tax a diminution of freedom, and yet it clearly is one.

Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.

The preservation of health is a duty. Few seem conscious that there is such a thing as physical morality.

Progress is not an accident, not a thing within human control, but a beneficent necessity ... due to the working of a universal law. So surely must the things we call evil and immorality disappear so surely must man become perfect.

Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.

Only when genius is married to science, can the biggest results be produced.

Marriage: a ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of the gentleman.

Government is essentially immoral.

To play billiards well is a sign of an ill-spent youth.

A jury is composed of twelve men of average ignorance.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Objects we ardently pursue bring little happiness when gained; most of our pleasures come from unexpected sources.

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation

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.

We have unmistakable proof that throughout all past time, there has been a ceaseless devouring of the weak by the strong

Anyone who studies the state of things which preceded the French Revolution will see that the tremendous catastrophe came about from so excessive a regulation of men's actions in all their details, and such an enormous drafting away of the products of their actions to maintain the regulating organization, that life was fast becoming impracticable. And if we ask what then made, and now makes, this error possible, we find it to be the political superstition that governmental power is subject to no restraints.

The survival of the fittest.

We all decry prejudice, yet are all prejudiced.

Science is organized knowledge.