Herbert Spencer Quotes

166 Sourced Quotes

Our lives are universally shortened by our ignorance.

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

Herbert Spencer
The education of the child must accord both in mode and arrangement with the education of mankind, considered historically. In other words, the genesis of knowledge in the individual, must follow the same course as the genesis of knowledge in the race. In strictness, this principle may be considered as already expressed by implication; since both being processes of evolution, must conform to those same general laws of evolution... and must therefore agree with each other. Nevertheless this particular parallelism is of value for the specific guidance it affords. To M. Comte we believe society owes the enunciation of it; and we may accept this item of his philosophy without at all committing ourselves to the rest.

Herbert Spencer
The chief arguments that are urged against an established religion, may be used with equal force against an established charity. The dissenter submits, that no party has a right to compel him to contribute to the support of doctrines, which do not meet his approbation. The rate-payer may as reasonably argue, that no one is justified in forcing him to subscribe towards the maintenance of persons, whom he does not consider deserving of relief.

Herbert Spencer
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
Morality knows nothing of geographical boundaries, or distinctions of race.

Herbert Spencer
The fact disclosed by a survey of the past that majorities have usually been wrong, must not blind us to the complementary fact that majorities have usually not been entirely wrong.

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

Herbert Spencer
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, farseeing benevolence.

Herbert Spencer
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.

Herbert Spencer
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
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
From generation to generation Science has been proving uniformities of relation among phenomena which were before thought either fortuitous or supernatural in their origin - has been showing an established order and a constant causation where ignorance had assumed irregularity and arbitrariness.

Herbert Spencer
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
It is not true that the facts of science are unpoetical; or that the cultivation of science is necessarily unfriendly to the exercise of imagination or the love of the beautiful. On the contrary science opens up realms of poetry where to the unscientific all is a blank.

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

Herbert Spencer
Whoever has not sought for fossils, has little idea of the poetical associations that surround the places where imbedded treasures were found.

Herbert Spencer
As, to the religious, it will seem absurd to set forth any justification for Religion; so, to the scientific, will it seem absurd to defend Science.

Herbert Spencer
But for science we should be still worshipping fetishes; or, with hecatombs of victims, propitiating diabolical deities.

Herbert Spencer
Science is organized knowledge; and before knowledge can be organized, some of it must first be possessed. Every study, therefore, should have a purely experimental introduction; and only after an ample fund of observations has been accumulated, should reasoning begin.

Herbert Spencer
Devotion to science is a tacit worship — a tacit recognition of worth in the things one studies; and by implication in their cause. It is not a mere lip-homage, but a homage expressed in actions — not a mere professed respect, but a respect proved by the sacrifice of time, thought, and labour.

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

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

Herbert Spencer
This speck of animated jelly [amoeba] is at once all stomach, all skin, all mouth, all limb, and doubtless, too, all lung.

Herbert Spencer
Government is essentially immoral. The State employs evil weapons to subjugate evil, and is alike contaminated by the objects with which it deals, and the means by which it works.

Herbert Spencer
The more numerous public instrumentalities become, the more is there generated in citizens the notion that everything is to be done for them, and nothing by them. Every generation is made less familiar with the attainment of desired ends by individual actions or private agencies; until, eventually, governmental agencies come to be thought of as the only available agencies.

Herbert Spencer
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
Where there are no distinctions of structure there are no distinctions of function.

Herbert Spencer
In assuming any office besides its essential one, the State begins to lose the power of fulfilling its essential one.

Herbert Spencer
Of all antagonisms of belief, the oldest, the widest, the most profound and the most important, is that between Religion and Science. It commenced when the recognition of the simplest uniformities in surrounding things, set a limit to the once universal superstition.

Herbert Spencer