Herbert Spencer - Social Statics (1851)

30 Sourced Quotes

View all Herbert Spencer Quotes
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.

Herbert Spencer
All evil results from the non-adaptation of constitution to conditions. This is true of everything that lives. Does a shrub dwindle in poor soil, or become sickly when deprived of light, or die outright if removed to a cold climate? it is because the harmony between its organization and its circumstances has been destroyed.

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
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
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
With a perfect economy, Nature turns all forces to account.

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

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
Pervading all nature we may see at work a stern discipline, which is a little cruel that it may be very kind.

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

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

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

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
However insignificant the minority, and however trifling the proposed trespass against their rights, no such trespass is permissible.

Herbert Spencer
Limiting the liberty of each by the like liberty of all, excludes a wide range of improper actions, but does not exclude certain other improper ones.

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

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

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
A clever theft was praiseworthy amongst the Spartans; and it is equally so amongst Christians, provided it be on a sufficiently large scale.

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

Herbert Spencer