Herbert Spencer
Who indeed, after pulling off the coloured glasses of prejudice and thrusting out of sight his pet projects, can help seeing the folly of these endeavours to protect men against themselves? A sad population of imbeciles would our schemers fill the world with, could their plans last.Collection: Pet
The wise man must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future.Collection: Future
Education has for its object the formation of character.Collection: Education
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.Collection: Men
A jury is composed of twelve men of average ignorance.Collection: Legal
Marriage: A word which should be pronounced 'mirage'.Collection: Marriage
The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.Collection: Knowledge
Science is organized knowledge.Collection: Science
When a man's knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion.Collection: Knowledge
Government is essentially immoral.Collection: Government
The preservation of health is a duty. Few seem conscious that there is such a thing as physical morality.Collection: Health
Marriage: a ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of the gentleman.Collection: Marriage
Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.Collection: Freedom
All socialism involves slavery.Collection: Government
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.Collection: Government
In science the important thing is to modify and change one's ideas as science advances.Collection: Science
We do not commonly see in a tax a diminution of freedom, and yet it clearly is one.Collection: Freedom
Society exists for the benefit of its members, not the members for the benefit of society.Collection: Society
Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.Collection: Poetry
Be bold, be bold, and everywhere be bold.
Every cause produces more than one effect.
What a cage is to the wild beast, law is to the selfish man.
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.
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.
Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.
We all decry prejudice, yet are all prejudiced.
How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.
Our lives are universally shortened by our ignorance.
Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.
Civilization is a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity toward a definite, coherent heterogeneity.
A living thing is distinguished from a dead thing by the multiplicity of the changes at any moment taking place in it.
Objects we ardently pursue bring little happiness when gained; most of our pleasures come from unexpected sources.
People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal.
Divine right of kings means the divine right of anyone who can get uppermost.
Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.
The behavior of men to the lower animals, and their behavior to each other, bear a constant relationship.
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.
Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror.
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.
Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts - as the one which, more than any other, ministers to the human spirit.
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.
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.Collection: Wisdom
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.Collection: Law
The society exists for the benefit of its members; not its members for the benefit of the society.Collection: Liberty
This 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 favoured races in the struggle for life.Collection: Life
What, then, do they want a government for? Not to regulate commerce; not to educate the people; not to teach religion, not to administer charity; not to make roads and railways; but simply to defend the natural rights of man -- to protect person and property -- to prevent the aggressions of the powerful upon the weak -- in a word, to administer justice. This is the natural, the original, office of a government. It was not intended to do less: it ought not to be allowed to do more.Collection: Powerful
The defects of the children mirror the defects of the parents.Collection: Children
We have unmistakable proof that throughout all past time, there has been a ceaseless devouring of the weak by the strong.Collection: Strong
Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity…It is a part of nature.Collection: Progress
The authoritarian sets up some book, or man, or tradition to establish the truth. The freethinker sets up reason and private judgment to discover the truth... It takes the highest courage to utter unpopular truths.Collection: Courage