Herbert Spencer Quotes

We all decry prejudice, yet are all prejudiced.

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

A function to each organ, and each organ to its own function, is the law of all organization.

Science is organized knowledge.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

It must be admitted that the conception of virtue cannot be separated from the conception of happiness-producing conduct.

Feudalism, serfdom, slavery — all tyrannical institutions, are merely the most vigorous kinds of rule, springing out of, and necessary to, a bad state of man. The progress from these is in all cases the same — less government.

A jury is composed of twelve men of average ignorance.

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.

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.

Be bold, be bold, and everywhere be bold.

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.

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.

In the supremacy of self-control consists one of the perfections of the ideal man.

The idea of disembodied spirits is wholly unsupported by evidence, and I cannot accept it.

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.

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 tyrant is nothing but a slave turned inside out.

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

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.

I emphasize the reply that the liberty which a citizen enjoys is to be measured, not by the nature of the governmental machinery he lives under, whether representative or other, but by the relative paucity of the restraints it imposes on him.

To have a specific style is to be poor in speech.

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

No physiologist who calmly considers the question in connection with the general truths of his science, can long resist the conviction that different parts of the cerebrum subserve different kinds of mental action. Localization of function is the law of all organization whatever: separateness of duty is universally accompanied with separateness of structure: and it would be marvellous were an exception to exist in the cerebral hemispheres.

Organs, faculties, powers, capacities, or whatever else we call them; grow by use and diminish from disuse, it is inferred that they will continue to do so. And if this inference is unquestionable, then is the one above deduced from it-that humanity must in the end become completely adapted to its conditions-unquestionable also. Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity.

There is no origin for the idea of an afterlife, save the conclusion which the savage draws from the notion suggested by dreams.

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.

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.

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

It is the function of parents to see that their children habitually experience the true consequences of their conduct.

If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.

So long as selfishness makes government needful at all, it must make every government corrupt, save one in which all men are represented.

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

Only when Genius is married to Science can the highest results be produced.

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