Top 195 Quotes & Sayings by Herbert Spencer

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

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

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

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.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Science is organized knowledge.

Government is essentially immoral.

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

We all decry prejudice, yet are all prejudiced.

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

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

A jury is composed of twelve men of average ignorance.

Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.

Every cause produces more than one effect.

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

All socialism involves slavery.

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.

Education has for its object the formation of character.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Our lives are universally shortened by our ignorance.

Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.

Who indeed, after pulling off the coloured glasses of prejudice and thrusting out of sight his pet projects, can help seeing the folly of these endeavours to protect men against themselves? A sad population of imbeciles would our schemers fill the world with, could their plans last.

Be bold, be bold, and everywhere be bold.

Civilization is a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity toward a definite, coherent heterogeneity.

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

The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.

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.

Divine right of kings means the divine right of anyone who can get uppermost.

Society exists for the benefit of its members, not the members for the benefit of society.

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

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

The society exists for the benefit of its members; not its members for the benefit of the society.

The belief, not only of the socialist but of those so-called liberals who are diligently preparing the way for them is that by due skill an ill working humanity may be framed into well-working initiations. It is delusion. The defective natures of citizens will show themselves in bad acting of whatever social structure they are arranged into. There is no political alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of laden instincts.

Education is preparation to live completely.

Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.

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.

Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity…It is a part of nature.

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.

The defects of the children mirror the defects of the parents.

The law is the survival of the fittest.... The law is not the survival of the 'better' or the 'stronger,' if we give to those words any thing like their ordinary meanings. It is the survival of those which are constitutionally fittest to thrive under the conditions in which they are placed; and very often that which, humanly speaking, is inferiority, causes the survival.

Agnostics are people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of matters, about which metaphysicians and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatize with the utmost confidence.

Mother, when your children are irritable, do not make them more so by scolding and fault-finding, but correct their irritability by good nature and mirthfulness. Irritability comes from errors in food, bad air, too little sleep, a necessity for change of scene and surroundings; from confinement in close rooms, and lack of sunshine.

The tyrant is nothing but a slave turned inside out.

The white light of truth, in traversing the many sided transparent soul of the poet, is refracted into iris-hued poetry.

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.

Every pleasure raises the tide of life; every pain lowers the tide of life.

Religion has been compelled by science to give up one after another of its dogmas. . . .

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

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