Herbert Spencer Quotes

• It was remarked to me by the late Mr Charles Roupell…that to play billiards well was a sign of an ill-spent youth.

  Herbert Spencer

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• The liberty that the citizen enjoys is to be measured not by the governmental machinery that he lives under, whether representative or otherwise, but by the paucity of restraints that it imposes upon him.

  Herbert Spencer

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• It cannot but happen…that those will survive whose functions happen to be most nearly in equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces… This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.

  Herbert Spencer

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

  Herbert Spencer

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  Tags in Selfish, Cage

• Marriage: A word which should be pronounced “mirage”.

  Herbert Spencer

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• Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts – as the one which, more than any other, ministers to the human spirit.

   

  Herbert Spencer

• Science is organized knowledge.

  Herbert Spencer

• When a man’s knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion.

  Herbert Spencer

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

  Herbert Spencer

• We all decry prejudice, yet are all prejudiced.

  Herbert Spencer

• Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.

  Herbert Spencer

• Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.

  Herbert Spencer

• The wise man must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future.

  Herbert Spencer

• The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.

  Herbert Spencer

• 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.

  Herbert Spencer

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

  Herbert Spencer

• 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.

  Herbert Spencer

• The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.

  Herbert Spencer

• 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.

  Herbert Spencer

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

  Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer (44)

Birth:	27th April, 1820
Death:	8th December, 1903
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Philosopher, Sociologist

About

Herbert Spencer was born in Derby, Derbyshire, England. He was an English philosopher and sociologist. He developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. As a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, religion, anthropology, economics, political theory, philosophy, literature, astronomy, biology, sociology, and psychology. He is best known for the expression "survival of the fittest", which he coined in Principles of Biology, after reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

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