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Progress is not an accident, not a thing within human control, but a beneficent necessity ... due to the working of a universal law. So surely must the things we call evil and immorality disappear so surely must man become perfect.

Herbert Spencer

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Herbert Spencer
Born: 1824
Born: April 27
Anthropologist
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Derby
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Gerbert Spencer
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More quotes by Herbert Spencer

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This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.
Herbert Spencer
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The existence of a first cause of the universe is a necessity of thought ... Amid the mysteries which become more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty that we are over in the presence of an Infinite, Eternal Energy from which all things proceed.
Herbert Spencer
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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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So long as selfishness makes government needful at all, it must make every government corrupt, save one in which all men are represented.
Herbert Spencer
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Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity…It is a part of nature.
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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No phrase can convey the idea of surprise so vividly as opening the eyes and raising the eyebrows. A shrug of the shoulders would lose much by translation into words.
Herbert Spencer
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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.
Herbert Spencer
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Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.
Herbert Spencer
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The universal basis of co-operation is the proportioning of benefits received to services rendered.
Herbert Spencer
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Our lives are universally shortened by our ignorance.
Herbert Spencer
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A function to each organ, and each organ to its own function, is the law of all organization.
Herbert Spencer
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A man's liberties are none the less aggressed upon because those who coerce him do so in the belief that he will be benefited.
Herbert Spencer
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We have unmistakable proof that throughout all past time, there has been a ceaseless devouring of the weak by the strong.
Herbert Spencer
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Let men learn that a legislature is not 'our God upon earth,' though, by the authority they ascribe to it, and the things they expect from it, they would seem to think it is. Let them learn rather that it is an institution serving a purely temporary purpose, whose power, when not stolen, is at the best borrowed.
Herbert Spencer
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It must be admitted that the conception of virtue cannot be separated from the conception of happiness-producing conduct.
Herbert Spencer
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Never educate a child to be a gentleman or lady alone, but to be a man, a woman.
Herbert Spencer
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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.
Herbert Spencer
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No philosopher's stone of a constitution can produce golden conduct from leaden instincts.
Herbert Spencer
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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.
Herbert Spencer