Quotes from Herbert Spencer

Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror.

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

People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal.

Marriage: a ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of the gentleman.

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

Every cause produces more than one effect.

Government is essentially immoral.

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.

Marriage: A word which should be pronounced "mirage."

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 favored races in the struggle for life."

A ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of the gentleman.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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

Science is organised knowledge.

Men are not rational beings, as commonly supposed. A man is a bundle of instincts, feelings, sentiments, which severally seek their gratification, and those which are in power get hold of reason and use it to their own ends, and exclude all other sentiments and feelings from power.

The belief in the innate virtues of constitutions is as baseless as was the belief in the natural superiorities of royal personages.

Ethics has to recognize the truth, recognized in unethical thought, that egoism comes before altruism. The acts required for continued self-preservation, including the enjoyment of benefits achieved by such acts, are the first requisites to universal welfare. Unless each duly cares for himself, his care for all others is ended by death; and if each thus dies, there remain no others to be cared for.

if the thing denied is the possibility of reducing Sociology to the form of an exact science; then the rejoinder is that the thing denied is a thing which no one has affirmed. . . But so far as there can be generalization, and so far as there can be interpretation based on it, so far there can be science.