Herbert Spencer Quotes.
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.
Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity…It is a part of nature.
Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.
Marriage: a ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of the gentleman.
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.
We all decry prejudice, yet are all prejudiced.
What a cage is to the wild beast, law is to the selfish man.
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.
We do not commonly see in a tax a diminution of freedom, and yet it clearly is one.
Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.
In science the important thing is to modify and change one’s ideas as science advances.
A living thing is distinguished from a dead thing by the multiplicity of the changes at any moment taking place in it.
Education has for its object the formation of character.
Pervading all nature we may see at work a stern discipline , which is a little cruel that it may be very kind.
Society exists for the benefit of its members, not the members for the benefit of society.
Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts – as the one which, more than any other, ministers to the human spirit.
Life is not for learning nor is life for working, but learning and working are for life.
Our lives are universally shortened by our ignorance.
Be bold, be bold, and everywhere be bold.
The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.
Divine right of kings means the divine right of anyone who can get uppermost.
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.
Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror.
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.
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.
Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.
When a man’s knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion.
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.
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.
Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.
Of all the knowledge, that most worth having is knowledge about health! The first requisite of a good life is to be a healthy person.
