Quotes By Herbert Spencer

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

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

Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.

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

The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

A jury is a group of twelve people of average ignorance.

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

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.

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

Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.

Our lives are universally shortened by our ignorance.

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

Science is organized knowledge.

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

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.

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.

A jury is composed of twelve men of average ignorance.

All socialism involves slavery.

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.

Government is essentially immoral.

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.

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

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.