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If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making?

Herbert Spencer

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Herbert Spencer
Born: 1824
Born: April 27
Anthropologist
Botanist
Economist
Journalist
Philosopher
Psychologist
Sociologist
Writer
Derby
Derbyshire
Spencert
Gerbert Spencer
Way
Remain
Despot
Men
Liberty
Thereafter
People
Freedom
Despots
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Making
Slaves
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Surrender
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Slave
Plebiscite

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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.
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Aggression which is flagitious when committed by one, is not sanctioned when committed by a host.
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It cannot but happen?that those will survive whose functions happen to be most nearly in equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces? This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.
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The saying that beauty is but skin deep, is but a skin-deep saying.
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The wise man must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future.
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Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.
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When a man's knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion.
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So long as selfishness makes government needful at all, it must make every government corrupt, save one in which all men are represented.
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The most important attribute of man as a moral being is the faculty of self-control.
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However insignificant the minority, and however trifling the proposed trespass against their rights, no such trespass is permissible.
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Thus poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially impressive partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech, and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances of excitement.
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The child takes most of his nature of the mother, besides speech, manners, and inclination.
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No place, no company, no age, no person is temptation-free let no man boast that he was never tempted, let him not be high-minded, but fear, for he may be surprised in that very instant wherein he boasteth that he was never tempted at all.
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Those whose hardships are set forth in pamphlets and proclaimed in sermons and speeches which echo throughout society, are assumed to be all worthy souls, grievously wronged and none of them are thought of as bearing the penalties of their misdeeds.
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It becomes possible to admit that plainness may coexist with nobility of nature, and fine features with baseness and yet to hold that mental and physical perfection are fundamentally connected, and will, when the present causes of incongruity have worked themselves out, be ever found united.
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Science is organized knowledge.
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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.
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The presumption that any current opinion is not wholly false, gains in strength according to the number of its adherents.
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Our lives are universally shortened by our ignorance.
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