Who indeed, after pulling off the coloured glasses of prejudice and thrusting out of sight his pet projects, can help seeing the folly of these endeavours to protect men against themselves? A sad population of imbeciles would our schemers fill the world with, could their plans last.
— Herbert Spencer
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.
Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts - as the one which, more than any other, ministers to the human spirit.
The behavior of men to the lower animals, and their behavior to each other, bear a constant relationship.
Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.
All socialism involves slavery.
Our lives are universally shortened by our ignorance.
A jury is composed of twelve men of average ignorance.
Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.
The preservation of health is a duty. Few seem conscious that there is such a thing as physical morality.
Civilization is a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity toward a definite, coherent heterogeneity.
Government is essentially immoral.
The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.
Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.
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.
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.
Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror.
In science the important thing is to modify and change one's ideas as science advances.
What a cage is to the wild beast, law is to the selfish man.
Be bold, be bold, and everywhere be bold.
We all decry prejudice, yet are all prejudiced.
Objects we ardently pursue bring little happiness when gained; most of our pleasures come from unexpected sources.
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.
When a man's knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion.
We do not commonly see in a tax a diminution of freedom, and yet it clearly is one.
Society exists for the benefit of its members, not the members for the benefit of society.
Marriage: A word which should be pronounced 'mirage'.
Science is organized knowledge.
People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal.
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.
Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.
Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.
Education has for its object the formation of character.
Every cause produces more than one effect.
Divine right of kings means the divine right of anyone who can get uppermost.
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.
A living thing is distinguished from a dead thing by the multiplicity of the changes at any moment taking place in it.
How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.
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.
The wise man must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future.
Marriage: a ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of the gentleman.
