Quotes from Herbert Spencer

Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.

Increasing power of a growing administrative organization is accompanied by decreasing power of the rest of the society to resist its further growth and control.

Education has for its object the formation of character.

Consumptive patients, with lungs incompetent to perform the duties of lungs, people with defective hearts that break down under excitement of the circulation, people with any constitutional flaw preventing the due fulfillment of the conditions of life are continually dying out and leaving behind those fit for the climate, food, and habits to which they are born....And thus is the race kept free from vitiation.

in the course of social evolution, usage precedes law; and that when usage has been well established it becomes law by receiving authoritative endorsement and defined form.

Time: That which man is always trying to kill, but which ends in killing him.

Crime is incurable, save by that gradual process of adaptation to the social state which humanity is undergoing. Crime is the continual breaking out of the old unadapted nature -- the index of a character unfitted to its conditions -- and only as fast as the unfitness diminishes can crime diminish.

All Socialism Involves Slavery.

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.

Divine right of kings means the divine right of anyone who can get uppermost.

Society exists for the benefit of its members, not the members for the benefit of society.

A living thing is distinguished from a dead thing by the multiplicity of the changes at any moment taking place in it.

In science the important thing is to modify and change one's ideas as science advances.

Time is that which man is always trying to kill, but which ends in killing him.

All Socialism involves slavery.

Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.

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.

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.

Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory it supported by no facts at all.

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.

Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.

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

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

Conservatism defends those coercive arrangements which a still-lingering savageness makes requisite. Radicalism endeavours to realize a state more in harmony with the character of the ideal man.