Herbert Spencer Quotes

166 Sourced Quotes

It is a mistake to assume that government must necessarily last forever. The institution marks a certain stage of civilization-is natural to a particular phase of human development. It is not essential, but incidental. As amongst the Bushmen we find a state antecedent to government, so may there be one in which it shall have become extinct.

Herbert Spencer
Practical atheism, seeing no guidance for human affairs but its own limited foresight, endeavors itself to play the god, and decide what will be good for mankind and what bad.

Herbert Spencer
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
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?

Herbert Spencer
Even the absurdest report may in nearly every instance be traced to an actual occurrence; and had there been no such actual occurrence, this preposterous misrepresentation of it would never have existed. Though the distorted or magnified image transmitted to us through the refracting medium of rumour, is utterly unlike the reality; yet in the absence of the reality there would have been no distorted or magnified image.

Herbert Spencer
Scientific truths, of whatever order, are reached by eliminating perturbing or conflicting factors, and recognizing only fundamental factors.

Herbert Spencer
Positive knowledge does not, and never can, fill the whole region of possible thought. At the uttermost reach of discovery there arises, and must ever arise, the question - What lies beyond?

Herbert Spencer
Slowly, but surely, evolution brings about an increasing amount of happiness; all evils being but incidental.

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

Herbert Spencer
The cruelty of a Fijian god, who, represented as devouring the souls of the dead, may be supposed to inflict torture during the process, is small compared with the cruelty of a God who condemns men to tortures which are eternal.

Herbert Spencer
By accumulated experiences the man of science acquires a thorough belief in the unchanging relations of phenomena - in the invariable connection of cause and consequence - in the necessity of good or evil results.

Herbert Spencer
What knowledge is of most worth? — the uniform reply is — Science. This is the verdict on all counts.

Herbert Spencer
If we contemplate the order of nature, we see that everywhere vast results are brought about by accumulations of minute actions.

Herbert Spencer
Those whose hardships are set forth in pamphlets and proclaimed in sermons and speeches which echo throughout society, are assumed to be all worthy souls, grievously wronged; and none of them are thought of as bearing the penalties of their misdeeds.

Herbert Spencer
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.

Herbert Spencer
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.

Herbert Spencer