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 SpencerPeople are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal.
Herbert SpencerThose who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.
Herbert SpencerLet men learn that a legislature is not 'our God upon earth,' though, by the authority they ascribe to it, and the things they expect from it, they would seem to think it is. Let them learn rather that it is an institution serving a purely temporary purpose, whose power, when not stolen, is at the best borrowed.
Herbert SpencerIf there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order. So that even were the order intrinsically indifferent, it would facilitate education to lead the individual mind through the steps traversed by the general mind. But the order is not intrinsically indifferent; and hence the fundamental reason why education should be a repetition of civilization in little.
Herbert SpencerAnd yet, strange to say, now that this truth is recognized by most cultivated people โ now that the beneficent working of the survival of the fittest has been so impressed on them that, much more than people in past times, they might be expected to hesitate before neutralizing its action โ now more than ever before in the history of the world, are they doing all they can to further survival of the unfittest!
Herbert Spencer