Top 100 Herbert Spencer Quotes
#1. The land monopoly always starts with conquest. Shot and shell are the coins of purchase, as Herbert Spencer said. Except by force of arms, nobody "owns" the earth, anymore than the moon, the planets, the stars themselves.
Robert Anton Wilson
#2. the great aim of education,' said Herbert Spencer, 'is not knowledge but action.
Dale Carnegie
#3. Herbert Spencer is little read now. Philosophers do not regard him as a major thinker. Social Darwinism has long been in disrepute.
Peter Singer
#4. The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.
Charles Darwin
#5. In the future I see open fields for more important researches. Psychology will be securely based on the foundation already laid by Mr. Herbert Spencer, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by graduation.
Charles Darwin
#6. survival of the fittest" - which was first coined by the economist Herbert Spencer
Douglas Brinkley
#7. The works of John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and Karl Marx had been forbidden. Students' libraries and clubs had been closed; and informers had been planted in the lecture halls. Entry fees had been raised fivefold to bar academic education to children of poor parents.
Isaac Deutscher
#8. It was Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the phrase Survival of the Fittest.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#9. Between twenty and thirty I gradually became more and more agnostic and irreligious, yet I cannot say that I ever lost that 'indefinite consciousness' which Herbert Spencer describes so well, of an Absolute Reality behind phenomena.
William James
#10. I had a great dislike to the annoyances entailed by baggage; and it was always with some feeling of elation that I cut myself free from everything but what I could carry about me. Like children, portmanteaus and trunks are hostages to fortune.
Herbert Spencer
#11. It becomes possible to admit that plainness may coexist with nobility of nature, and fine features with baseness; and yet to hold that mental and physical perfection are fundamentally connected, and will, when the present causes of incongruity have worked themselves out, be ever found united.
Herbert Spencer
#12. The most important attribute of man as a moral being is the faculty of self-control.
Herbert Spencer
#13. Regarding language as an apparatus of symbols for the conveyance of thought, we may say that, as in a mechanical apparatus, the more simple and the better arranged its parts, the greater will be the effect produced.
Herbert Spencer
#14. Increasing power of a growing administrative organization is accompanied by decreasing power of the rest of the society to resist its further growth and control.
Herbert Spencer
#15. To play billiards well is the sign of a misspent youth.
Herbert Spencer
#16. In the supremacy of self-control consists one of the perfections of the ideal man.
Herbert Spencer
#17. It is the function of parents to see that their children habitually experience the true consequences of their conduct.
Herbert Spencer
#18. 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.
Herbert Spencer
#19. No place, no company, no age, no person is temptation-free; let no man boast that he was never tempted, let him not be high-minded, but fear, for he may be surprised in that very instant wherein he boasteth that he was never tempted at all.
Herbert Spencer
#20. 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.
Herbert Spencer
#21. Before he can remake his society, his society must make him.
Herbert Spencer
#22. The greatest of all infidelities is the fear that the truth will be bad.
Herbert Spencer
#23. Morality knows nothing of geographical boundaries, or distinctions of race.
Herbert Spencer
#25. Every pleasure raises the tide of life; every pain lowers the tide of life.
Herbert Spencer
#26. 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.
Herbert Spencer
#27. Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory it supported by no facts at all.
Herbert Spencer
#28. 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.
Herbert Spencer
#29. With a higher moral nature will come a restriction on the multiplication of the inferior.
Herbert Spencer
#30. Marriage: a ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of the gentleman.
Herbert Spencer
#31. 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.
Herbert Spencer
#32. Education has for its object the formation of character.
Herbert Spencer
#33. Objects we ardently pursue bring little happiness when gained; most of our pleasures come from unexpected sources.
Herbert Spencer
#34. The presumption that any current opinion is not wholly false, gains in strength according to the number of its adherents.
Herbert Spencer
#35. Aggression which is flagitious when committed by one, is not sanctioned when committed by a host.
Herbert Spencer
#36. During human progress, every science is evolved out of its corresponding art.
Herbert Spencer
#37. Lusts are like agues; the fit is not always on, and yet the man is not rid of his disease; and some men's lusts, like some agues, have not such quick returns as others.
Herbert Spencer
#38. If on one day we find the fast-spreading recognition of popular rights accompanied by a silent, growing perception of the rights of women, we also find it accompanied by a tendency towards a system of non-coercive education
that is, towards a practical illustration of the rights of children.
Herbert Spencer
#39. Religion has been compelled by science to give up one after another of its dogmas ...
Herbert Spencer
#40. A function to each organ, and each organ to its own function, is the law of all organization.
Herbert Spencer
#41. Education has for its object to develop the child into a man of well proportioned and harmonious nature-this is alike the aim of parent and teacher.
Herbert Spencer
#42. No man is equal to his book. All the best products of his mental activity go into his book, where they come separated from the mass of inferior products with which they are mingled in his daily talk.
Herbert Spencer
#44. Never educate a child to be a gentleman or lady alone, but to be a man, a woman.
Herbert Spencer
#45. If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making?
Herbert Spencer
#46. A man's liberties are none the less aggressed upon because those who coerce him do so in the belief that he will be benefited.
Herbert Spencer
#47. Truth generally lies in the coordination of antagonistic opinions.
Herbert Spencer
#48. It cannot but happen?that those will survive whose functions happen to be most nearly in equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces? This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.
Herbert Spencer
#50. The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.
Herbert Spencer
#52. Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts - as the one which, more than any other, ministers to the human spirit.
Herbert Spencer
#53. The primary use of knowledge is for such guidance of conduct under all circumstances as shall make living complete. All other uses of knowledge are secondary.
Herbert Spencer
#54. When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don't care if they are shot themselves.
Herbert Spencer
#56. Absolute morality is the regulation of conduct in such a way that pain shall not be inflicted.
Herbert Spencer
#57. No philosopher's stone of a constitution can produce golden conduct from leaden instincts.
Herbert Spencer
#58. Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.
Herbert Spencer
#59. A cell of a higher organism contains a thousand different substances, arranged in a complex system. This great organized system was not discovered by chemical or physical methods; they are inadequate to its refinement and delicacy and complexity.
Herbert Spencer Jennings
#60. Whatever fosters militarism makes for barbarism; whatever fosters peace makes for civilization.
Herbert Spencer
#61. The child takes most of his nature of the mother, besides speech, manners, and inclination.
Herbert Spencer
#62. Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity ... It is a part of nature.
Herbert Spencer
#63. When you take comprehensive, then we're dealing with certain issues like full citizenship ... And whatever else we disagree on, I think we would agree on that that's a more toxic and contentious issue, granting full amnesty.
Herbert Spencer
#64. The home is the most important factor in civilization, and that civilization is to be measured at different stages largely by the development in the home.
Herbert Spencer
#65. Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.
Herbert Spencer
#66. Every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with the possession of like liberties by every other man.
Herbert Spencer
#67. Equity knows no difference of sex. In its vocabulary the word man must be understood in a generic, and not in a specific sense.
Herbert Spencer
#68. What a cage is to the wild beast, law is to the selfish man.
Herbert Spencer
#69. 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.
Herbert Spencer
#70. In literary art, as in the art of the architect, the painter, the musician, signs that the artist is thinking of his own achievement more than of his subject always offend me.
Herbert Spencer
#71. The behavior of men to the lower animals, and their behavior to each other, bear a constant relationship.
Herbert Spencer
#72. 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.
Herbert Spencer
#73. The saying that beauty is but skin deep, is but a skin-deep saying.
Herbert Spencer
#74. The freest form of government is only the least objectionable form. The rule of the many by the few we call tyranny: the rule of the few by the many is tyranny also; only of a less intense kind.
Herbert Spencer
#76. There is no origin for the idea of an afterlife, save the conclusion which the savage draws from the notion suggested by dreams.
Herbert Spencer
#78. The pursuit of individual happiness within those limits prescribed by social conditions, is the first requisite to the attainment of the greatest general happiness.
Herbert Spencer
#79. 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.
Herbert Spencer
#80. A living thing is distinguished from a dead thing by the multiplicity of the changes at any moment taking place in it.
Herbert Spencer
#81. So far from science being irreligious, as many think, it is the neglect of science that is irreligious-it is the refusal to study the surrounding creation that is irreligious.
Herbert Spencer
#82. Without painting, sculpture, music, poetry, and the emotions produced by natural beauty of every kind, life would lose half its charm.
Herbert Spencer
#83. No phrase can convey the idea of surprise so vividly as opening the eyes and raising the eyebrows. A shrug of the shoulders would lose much by translation into words.
Herbert Spencer
#84. In assuming any office besides its essential one, the State begins to lose the power of fulfilling its essential one.
Herbert Spencer
#85. 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.
Herbert Spencer
#86. A stern discipline pervades all nature, which is a little cruel that it may be very kind.
Herbert Spencer
#87. To play billiards well was a sign of an ill-spent youth
Herbert Spencer
#88. Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.
Herbert Spencer
#89. 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.
Herbert Spencer
#90. We have unmistakable proof that throughout all past time, there has been a ceaseless devouring of the weak by the strong.
Herbert Spencer
#91. The universal basis of co-operation is the proportioning of benefits received to services rendered.
Herbert Spencer
#93. We do not commonly see in a tax a diminution of freedom, and yet it clearly is one.
Herbert Spencer
#94. However insignificant the minority, and however trifling the proposed trespass against their rights, no such trespass is permissible.
Herbert Spencer
#95. We have repeatedly observed that while any whole is evolving, there is always going on an evolution of the parts into which it divides itself; but we have not observed that this equally holds of the totality of things, which is made up of parts within parts from the greatest down to the smallest.
Herbert Spencer
#96. So long as selfishness makes government needful at all, it must make every government corrupt, save one in which all men are represented.
Herbert Spencer
#97. The authoritarian sets up some book, or man, or tradition to establish the truth. The freethinker sets up reason and private judgment to discover the truth ... It takes the highest courage to utter unpopular truths.
Herbert Spencer
#98. 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.
Herbert Spencer
#99. The "Creed of Christendom" is alien to my nature, both emotional and intellectual.
Herbert Spencer
#100. Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.
Herbert Spencer
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