Herbert Spencer - Man Quotes

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Surely if a single cell may, when subjected to certain influences, become a man in the space of twenty years; there is nothing absurd in the hypothesis that under certain other influences, a cell may, in the course of millions of years, give origin to the human race.

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
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
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
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.

Herbert Spencer
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.

Herbert Spencer
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.

Herbert Spencer
The genuine man of science, we say, can truly know how utterly beyond, not only human knowledge, but human conception, is the Universal Power of which Nature, and Life, and Thought are manifestations. Education

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

Herbert Spencer
Reading is seeing by proxy — is learning indirectly through another man's faculties instead of directly through one's own.

Herbert Spencer
That the uneducated and the ill-educated should think the hypothesis that all races of beings, man inclusive, may in process of time have been evolved from the simplest monad, a ludicrous one, is not to be wondered at. But for the physiologist, who knows that every individual being is so evolved—who knows, further, that in their earliest condition the germs of all plants and animals whatever are so similar, "that there is no appreciable distinction amongst them, which would enable it to be determined whether a particular molecule is the germ of a Conferva or of an Oak, of a Zoophyte or of a Man";—for him to make a difficulty of the matter is inexcusable.

Herbert Spencer
Man needed one moral constitution to fit him for his original state; he needs another to fit him for his present state; and he has been, is, and will long continue to be, in process of adaptation.

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

Herbert Spencer
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?

Herbert Spencer
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.

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

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

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

Herbert Spencer
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.

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

Herbert Spencer
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.

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

Herbert Spencer