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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.

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
Wrong
Majorities
Fact
Complementary
Facts
Survey
Past
Surveys
Must
Entirely
Blind
Majority
Usually
Disclosed

More quotes by Herbert Spencer

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How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.
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Government is essentially immoral. The State employs evil weapons to subjugate evil, and is alike contaminated by the objects with which it deals, and the means by which it works.
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Absolute morality is the regulation of conduct in such a way that pain shall not be inflicted.
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The universal basis of co-operation is the proportioning of benefits received to services rendered.
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In the supremacy of self-control consists one of the perfections of the ideal man.
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Strong as it looks at the outset, State-agency perpetually disappoints every one. Puny as are its first stages, private efforts daily achieve results that astound the world.
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Every unpunished delinquency has a family of delinquencies.
Herbert Spencer
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Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.
Herbert Spencer
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The idea of disembodied spirits is wholly unsupported by evidence, and I cannot accept it.
Herbert Spencer
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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.
Herbert Spencer
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The most important attribute of man as a moral being is the faculty of self-control.
Herbert Spencer
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I emphasize the reply that the liberty which a citizen enjoys is to be measured, not by the nature of the governmental machinery he lives under, whether representative or other, but by the relative paucity of the restraints it imposes on him.
Herbert Spencer
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The question of questions for the politicians should ever be-What type of social structure am I tending to produce? But this is a question he never entertains.
Herbert Spencer
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Our lives are universally shortened by our ignorance.
Herbert Spencer
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We must infer that a plant or animal of any species, is made up of special units, in all of which there dwells the intrinsic aptitude to aggregate into the form of that species: just as in the atoms of a salt, there dwells the intrinsic aptitude to crystallize in a particular way.
Herbert Spencer
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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.
Herbert Spencer
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Religion has been compelled by science to give up one after another of its dogmas. . . .
Herbert Spencer
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In societies of low civilization, there is no money.
Herbert Spencer
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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.
Herbert Spencer
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The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many in shallows and in miseries, are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence.
Herbert Spencer