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

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Conservatism defends those coercive arrangements which a still-lingering savageness makes requisite. Radicalism endeavours to realize a state more in harmony with the character of the ideal man.
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Religion is the recognition that all things are manifestations of a Power which transcends our knowledge.
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The society exists for the benefit of its members not its members for the benefit of the society.
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Education has for its object to develop the child into a man of well proportioned and harmonious nature-this is alike the aim of parent and teacher.
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Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.
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Never educate a child to be a gentleman or lady alone, but to be a man, a woman.
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It is a mistake to assume that government must necessarily last forever. The institution marks a certain stage of civilization-is natural to a particular phase of human development. It is not essential, but incidental. As amongst the Bushmen we find a state antecedent to government, so may there be one in which it shall have become extinct.
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Objects we ardently pursue bring little happiness when gained most of our pleasures come from unexpected sources.
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Marriage: a ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of the gentleman.
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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?
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The child takes most of his nature of the mother, besides speech, manners, and inclination.
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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 ideal form for a poem, essay, or fiction, is that which the ideal writer would evolve spontaneously. One in whom the powers of expression fully responded to the state of feeling, would unconsciously use that variety in the mode of presenting his thoughts, which Art demands.
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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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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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In science the important thing is to modify and change one's ideas as science advances.
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Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.
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When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don't care if they are shot themselves.
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A jury is composed of twelve men of average ignorance.
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In the supremacy of self-control consists one of the perfections of the ideal man.
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