Herbert Spencer

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.

That feelings of love and hate make rational judgments impossible in public affairs, as in private affairs, we can clearly enough see in others, though not so clearly in ourselves.

Be it or be it not true that Man is shapen in iniquity and conceived in sin, it is unquestionably true that Government is begotten of aggression, and by aggression.

Organs, faculties, powers, capacities, or whatever else we call them; grow by use and diminish from disuse, it is inferred that they will continue to do so. And if this inference is unquestionable, then is the one above deduced from it-that humanity must in the end become completely adapted to its conditions-unquestionable also. Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity.

This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.

I emphasize the reply that the liberty which a citizen enjoys is to be measured, not by the nature of the governmental machinery he lives under, whether representative or other, but by the relative paucity of the restraints it imposes on him.

The society exists for the benefit of its members; not its members for the benefit of the society.

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

Education has for its object the formation of character.

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

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

Education is preparation to live completely.

Any piece of knowledge which the pupil has himself acquired- any problem which he has himself solved, becomes, by virtue of the conquest, much more thoroughly his than it could else be. The preliminary activity of mind which his success implies, the concentration of thought necessary to it, and the excitement consequent on his triumph, conspire to register the facts in his memory in a way that no mere information heard from a teacher, or read in a schoolbook, can be registered.

However insignificant the minority, and however trifling the proposed trespass against their rights, no such trespass is permissible.

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

Rightness expresses of actions, what straightness does of lines; and there can no more be two kinds of right action than there can be two kinds of straight lines.

Let men learn that a legislature is not 'our God upon earth,' though, by the authority they ascribe to it, and the things they expect from it, they would seem to think it is. Let them learn rather that it is an institution serving a purely temporary purpose, whose power, when not stolen, is at the best borrowed.

Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.

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

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.