Herbert Spencer Quotations

The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

A jury is composed of twelve men of average ignorance.

We all decry prejudice, yet are all prejudiced.

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.

Be bold, be bold, and everywhere be bold.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Our lives are universally shortened by our ignorance.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.

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

Education has for its object the formation of character.

No one can be perfectly free till all are free.

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

The 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 favored races in the struggle for life.

Or it needs only to look back over past centuries and the iniquities alike of populace, nobles, kings, and popes to perceive an almost incomprehensible futility of the beliefs everywhere held and perpetually insisted upon

of the lady and through the nose of the gentleman.

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

A jury is a group of twelve people of average ignorance

There is one principle that can keep a man in everlasting ignorance. That is contempt prior to investigation.

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.

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

All socialism involves slavery.

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.

Education has for its object the formation of character. To curb restive propensities, to awaken dormant sentiments, to strengthen the perceptions, and cultivate the tastes, to encourage this feeling and repress that, so as finally to develop the child into a man of well proportioned and harmonious nature, this is alike the aim of parent and teacher.

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.

Ethical ideas and sentiments have to be considered as parts of the phenomena of life at large. We have to deal with man as a product of evolution, with society as a product of evolution, and with moral phenomena as products of evolution.

This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

Science is organized knowledge.

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

Courage is worthy of respect when displayed in the maintenance of legitimate claims and in the repelling of aggressions, bodily or other. Courage is worthy of yet higher respect when danger is faced in defence of claims common to self and others, as in resistance to invasion. Courage is worthy of the highest respect when risk to life or limb is dared in defence of others.

Let 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.

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

We have a priori reasons for believing that in every sentence there is some one order of words more effective than any other; and that this order is the one which presents the elements of the proposition in the succession in which they may be most readily put together.

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.

The present relationship existing between husband and wife, where one claims a command over the actions of the other, is nothing more than a remnant of the old leaven of slavery. It is necessarily destructive of refined love; for how can a man continue to regard as his type of the ideal a being whom he has, be denying an equality of privilege with himself, degraded to something below himself?

If men were wise they would see that the affection that God has implanted in us is amply sufficient, when not weakened by artificial aid, to ensure permanence of union; and if they would have more faith in this all would go well. To tie together by human law what God has tied together by passion, is about as wise as it would be to chain the moon to the earth lest the natural attraction existing between them should not be sufficient to prevent them flying asunder.

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.

Any piece of knowledge which the pupil has himself acquired- any problem which he has himself solved, becomes, by virtue of the conquest, much more thoroughly his than it could else be. The preliminary activity of mind which his success implies, the concentration of thought necessary to it, and the excitement consequent on his triumph, conspire to register the facts in his memory in a way that no mere information heard from a teacher, or read in a schoolbook, can be registered.

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.

Music may appeal to crude and coarse feelings or to refined and noble ones; and in so far as it does the latter it awakens the higher nature and works an effect, though but a transitory effect, of a beneficial kind. But the primary purpose of music is neither instruction nor culture but pleasure; and this is an all-sufficient purpose.

Under the natural course of things each citizen tends towards his fittest function. Those who are competent to the kind of work they undertake, succeed, and, in the average of cases, are advanced in proportion to their efficiency; while the incompetent, society soon finds out, ceases to employ, forces to try something easier, and eventually turns to use.

Never educate a child to be a gentleman or lady alone, but to be a man, a woman.

The saying that beauty is but skin deep, is but a skin-deep saying.

A nation's institutions and beliefs are determined by it's character.

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

For what is meant by saying that a government ought to educate the people? Why should they be educated? What is the education for? Clearly, to fit the people for social life - to make them good citizens. And who is to say what are good citizens? The government: there is no other judge. And who is to say how these good citizens may be made? The government: there is no other judge. Hence the proposition is convertible into this - a government ought to mold children into good citizens, using its own discretion in settling what a good citizen is and how the child may be molded into one.

People ... become so preoccupied with the means by which an end is achieved, as eventually to mistake it for the end. Just as money, which is a means of satisfying wants, comes to be regarded by a miser as the sole thing to be worked for, leaving the wants unsatisfied; so the conduct men have found preferable because most conducive to happiness, has come to be thought of as intrinsically preferable: not only to be made a proximate end (which it should be), but to be made an ultimate end, to the exclusion of the true ultimate end.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

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

All socialism involves slavery. That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labours under coercion to satisfy anothers desires.

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.

Every cause produces more than one effect.

Be it or be it not true that Man is shapen in iniquity and conceived in sin, it is unquestionably true that Government is begotten of aggression, and by aggression.

The liberty the citizen enjoys is to be measured not by governmental machinery he lives under, whether representative or other, but by the paucity of restraints it imposes upon him.

Strong as it looks at the outset, State-agency perpetually disappoints every one. Puny as are its first stages, private efforts daily achieve results that astound the world.

Equity knows no difference of sex. In its vocabulary the word man must be understood in a generic, and not in a specific sense.

No philosopher's stone of a constitution can produce golden conduct from leaden instincts.

During human progress, every science is evolved out of its corresponding art.

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.

If 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.

Much dearer be the things which come through hard distress.

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.

That feelings of love and hate make rational judgments impossible in public affairs, as in private affairs, we can clearly enough see in others, though not so clearly in ourselves.

Every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with the possession of like liberties by every other man.

The presumption that any current opinion is not wholly false, gains in strength according to the number of its adherents.

There is a story of some mountains of salt in Cumana, which never diminished, though carried away in much abundance by merchants; but when once they were monopolized to the benefit of a private purse, then the salt decreased; till afterward all were allowed to take of it, when it had a new access and increase. The truth of this story may be uncertain, but the application is true; he that envies others the use of his gifts decays then, but he thrives most that is most diffusive.

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.

Sundry manifestations of nature in men and women, are greatly perverted by existing social conventions upheld by both. There are feelings which, under our predatory régime, with its adapted standard of propriety, it is not considered manly to show; but which, contrariwise, are considered admirable in women. Hence repressed manifestations in the one case, and exaggerated manifestations in the other; leading to mistaken estimates.

Truth generally lies in the coordination of antagonistic opinions.

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.

Progress is not an accident, not a thing within human control, but a beneficent necessity ... due to the working of a universal law. So surely must the things we call evil and immorality disappear; so surely must man become perfect.