Quotes by Herbert Spencer

• The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.
• Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.
• Our lives are universally shortened by our ignorance.
• People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal.
• Science is organized knowledge.
• Society exists for the benefit of its members, not the members for the benefit of society.
• The behavior of men to the lower animals, and their behavior to each other, bear a constant relationship.
• 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.
• The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.
• 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.
• 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.
• The wise man must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future.
• Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.
• Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.
• We all decry prejudice, yet are all prejudiced.
• We do not commonly see in a tax a diminution of freedom, and yet it clearly is one.
• What a cage is to the wild beast, law is to the selfish man.
• When a man's knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion.
• Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror.
• Be bold, be bold, and everywhere be bold.
• The preservation of health is a duty. Few seem conscious that there is such a thing as physical morality.
• Government is essentially immoral.
• A jury is a group of twelve people of average ignorance.
• A jury is composed of twelve men of average ignorance.
• A living thing is distinguished from a dead thing by the multiplicity of the changes at any moment taking place in it.
• All socialism involves slavery.
• 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.
• Objects we ardently pursue bring little happiness when gained; most of our pleasures come from unexpected sources.
• Civilization is a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity toward a definite, coherent heterogeneity.
• Divine right of kings means the divine right of anyone who can get uppermost.
• Every cause produces more than one effect.
• Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.
• How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.
• In science the important thing is to modify and change one's ideas as science advances.
• Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.
• 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.
• Marriage: a ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of the gentleman.
• Marriage: A word which should be pronounced "mirage".
• Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts - as the one which, more than any other, ministers to the human spirit.
• 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.
• Education has for its object the formation of character.