Herbert Spencer Quotes

“All evil results from the non-adaptation of constitution to conditions. This is true of everything that lives.”

“All socialism involves slavery.”

“And yet, strange to say, now that the truth [of natural selection] is recognized by most cultivated people... now more than ever, in the history of the world, are they doing all they can to further the survival of the unfittest.”

“Be bold, be bold, and everywhere be bold.”

“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.”

“Education has for its object the formation of character.”

“Evil perpetually tends to disappear.”

“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.”

“Science is organized knowledge.”

“The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.”

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

“The profoundest of all infidelities is the fear that the truth will be bad.”

“They who employ force by proxy are as much responsible for that force as though they employed it themselves.”

“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.”

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

“Whatever fosters militarism makes for barbarism; whatever fosters peace makes for civilization.”

“When a man's knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has, the greater is his confusion.”

“No man is equal to his book. All the best products of his mental activity go into his book, where they come separated from the mass of inferior products with which they are mingled in his daily talk.”

“Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.”

“Every cause produces more than one effect.”

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

“The saying that beauty is but skin deep is but a skin-deep saying.”

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

“Under the natural course of things each citizen tends towards his fittest function. Those who are competent to the kind of work they undertake, succeed, and, in the average of cases, are advanced in proportion to their efficiency; while the incompetent, society soon finds out, ceases to employ, forces to try something easier, and eventually turns to use.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.”

“This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.”