Herbert Spencer Quotes - Page 3

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.

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

This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.

Civilization is a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity toward a definite, coherent heterogeneity.

Every unpunished delinquency has a family of delinquencies.

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.

No place, no company, no age, no person is temptation-free; let no man boast that he was never tempted, let him not be high-minded, but fear, for he may be surprised in that very instant wherein he boasteth that he was never tempted at all.

The saying that beauty is but skin deep, is but a skin-deep saying.

We do not commonly see in a tax a diminution of freedom, and yet it clearly is one.

Religion is the recognition that all things are manifestations of a Power which transcends our knowledge.

The preservation of health is a duty. Few seem conscious that there is such a thing as physical morality.

With a higher moral nature will come a restriction on the multiplication of the inferior.

The white light of truth, in traversing the many sided transparent soul of the poet, is refracted into iris-hued poetry.

Every pleasure raises the tide of life; every pain lowers the tide of life.

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?

Be bold, be bold, and everywhere be bold.

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.

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

No one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.

For what is meant by saying that a government ought to educate the people? Why should they be educated? What is the education for? Clearly, to fit the people for social life - to make them good citizens. And who is to say what are good citizens? The government: there is no other judge. And who is to say how these good citizens may be made? The government: there is no other judge. Hence the proposition is convertible into this - a government ought to mold children into good citizens, using its own discretion in settling what a good citizen is and how the child may be molded into one.

The presumption that any current opinion is not wholly false, gains in strength according to the number of its adherents.

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.

Our lives are universally shortened by our ignorance.

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.

All socialism involves slavery.... That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labors under coercion to satisfy another's desires. The relation admits of many gradations. Oppressive taxation is a form of slavery of the individual to the community as a whole. The essential question is -- How much is he compelled to labor for other benefit than his own, and how much can he labor for his own benefit?