Herbert Spencer
All socialism involves slavery. That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labours under coercion to satisfy anothers desires.Collection: Desire
Education is preparation to live completely.Collection: Education
The most important attribute of man as a moral being is the faculty of self-control.Collection: Motivational
Religion has been compelled by science to give up one after another of its dogmas. . . .Collection: Giving Up
The presumption that any current opinion is not wholly false, gains in strength according to the number of its adherents.Collection: Numbers
Every unpunished delinquency has a family of delinquencies.Collection: Results
Never educate a child to be a gentleman or lady alone, but to be a man, a woman.Collection: Children
Every pleasure raises the tide of life; every pain lowers the tide of life.Collection: Pain
Is it stupidity or is it moral cowardice which leads men to continue professing a creed that makes self-sacrifice a cardinal principle, while they urge the sacrificing of others, even to the death, when they trespass against us? Is it blindness, or is it an insance inconsistency, which makes them regard as most admirable the bearing of evil for the benefit of others, while they lavish admiration on those who, out of revenge, inflict great evils in return for small ones suffered? Surely our barbarian code of right needs revision, and our barbarian standard of honour should be somewhat changed.Collection: Revenge
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.Collection: Men
The white light of truth, in traversing the many sided transparent soul of the poet, is refracted into iris-hued poetry.Collection: Light
Absolute morality is the regulation of conduct in such a way that pain shall not be inflicted.Collection: Pain
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, far-seeing benevolence.Collection: Strong
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.Collection: Teacher
Morality knows nothing of geographical boundaries, or distinctions of race.Collection: Race
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?Collection: Freedom
The saying that beauty is but skin deep, is but a skin-deep saying.Collection: Beauty
When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don't care if they are shot themselves.Collection: Men
The pursuit of individual happiness within those limits prescribed by social conditions, is the first requisite to the attainment of the greatest general happiness.Collection: Individual Happiness
If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.Collection: Science
Feudalism, serfdom, slavery — all tyrannical institutions, are merely the most vigorous kinds of rule, springing out of, and necessary to, a bad state of man. The progress from these is in all cases the same — less government.Collection: Men
Any one who studies the state of things which preceded the French Revolution will see that that tremendous catastrophe came about from so excessive a regulation of men's actions in all their details, and such an enormous drafting away of the products of their actions to maintain the regulating organization, that life was fast becoming impracticable. And if we ask what then made, and now makes, this error possible, we find it to be the political superstition that governmental power is subject to no restraints.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Men
Unlike private enterprise which quickly modifies its actions to meet emergencies - unlike the shopkeeper who promptly finds the wherewith to satisfy a sudden demand - unlike the railway company which doubles its trains to carry a special influx of passengers; the law-made instrumentality lumbers on under all varieties of circumstances at its habitual rate. By its very nature it is fitted only for average requirements, and inevitably fails under unusual requirements.Collection: Average
Time: That which man is always trying to kill, but which ends in killing him.Collection: Time
The existence of a first cause of the universe is a necessity of thought ... Amid the mysteries which become more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty that we are over in the presence of an Infinite, Eternal Energy from which all things proceed.Collection: Science
Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.Collection: Men
Marriage: A word which should be pronounced "mirage".Collection: Funny
The home is the most important factor in civilization, and that civilization is to be measured at different stages largely by the development in the home.Collection: Home
Of all the knowledge, that most worth having is knowledge about health! The first requisite of a good life is to be a healthy person.Collection: Good Life
This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.Collection: Science
Religion is the recognition that all things are manifestations of a Power which transcends our knowledge.Collection: Recognition
The greatest of all infidelities is the fear that the truth will be bad.Collection: Fear
Reading is seeing by proxy.Collection: Reading
Mother, when your children are irritable, do not make them more so by scolding and fault-finding, but correct their irritability by good nature and mirthfulness. Irritability comes from errors in food, bad air, too little sleep, a necessity for change of scene and surroundings; from confinement in close rooms, and lack of sunshine.Collection: Mother
Life is not for learning nor is life for working, but learning and working are for life.Collection: Balance
Agnostics are people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of matters, about which metaphysicians and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatize with the utmost confidence.Collection: People
Truth generally lies in the coordination of antagonistic opinions.Collection: Truth
Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.Collection: Sculpture
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.Collection: Echoes
Rightness expresses of actions, what straightness does of lines; and there can no more be two kinds of right action than there can be two kinds of straight lines.Collection: Two
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.Collection: Men
People ... become so preoccupied with the means by which an end is achieved, as eventually to mistake it for the end. Just as money, which is a means of satisfying wants, comes to be regarded by a miser as the sole thing to be worked for, leaving the wants unsatisfied; so the conduct men have found preferable because most conducive to happiness, has come to be thought of as intrinsically preferable: not only to be made a proximate end (which it should be), but to be made an ultimate end, to the exclusion of the true ultimate end.Collection: Mistake
No philosopher's stone of a constitution can produce golden conduct from leaden instincts.Collection: Stones
Under the natural course of things each citizen tends towards his fittest function. Those who are competent to the kind of work they undertake, succeed, and, in the average of cases, are advanced in proportion to their efficiency; while the incompetent, society soon finds out, ceases to employ, forces to try something easier, and eventually turns to use.Collection: Average
I emphasize the reply that the liberty which a citizen enjoys is to be measured, not by the nature of the governmental machinery he lives under, whether representative or other, but by the relative paucity of the restraints it imposes on him.Collection: Liberty
The question of questions for the politicians should ever be-What type of social structure am I tending to produce? But this is a question he never entertains.Collection: Politics
Policeman are soldiers who act alone; soldiers are policeman who act in unison.Collection: Soldier
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.Collection: Simple