Herbert Spencer Quotes

Science is organized knowledge.

The forces which are working out the great scheme of perfect happiness, taking no account of incidental suffering, exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their way, with the same sternness that they exterminate beasts of prey and herds of useless ruminants.

No one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.

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.

إن الأديان على قدر إختلافها فى عقائدها المعلنة,تتفق ضمنيا فى إيمانها بأن وجود الكون هو سر يتطلب التفسير

Education has for its object the formation of character.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

the great aim of education is not knowledge but action

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

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.