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The presumption that any current opinion is not wholly false, gains in strength according to the number of its adherents.

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
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More quotes by Herbert Spencer

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Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory it supported by no facts at all.
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Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.
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People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal.
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All evil results from the non-adaptation of constitution to conditions. This is true of everything that lives. Does a shrub dwindle in poor soil, or become sickly when deprived of light, or die outright if removed to a cold climate? it is because the harmony between its organization and its circumstances has been destroyed.
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The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.
Herbert Spencer
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Music ministers to human welfare more than any other art.
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Do not try to produce an ideal child, it would find no fitness in this world.
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Practical atheism, seeing no guidance for human affairs but its own limited foresight, endeavors itself to play the god, and decide what will be good for mankind and what bad.
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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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In the supremacy of self-control consists one of the perfections of the ideal man.
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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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Time: That which man is always trying to kill, but which ends in killing him.
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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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We too often forget that not only is there 'a soul of goodness in things evil,' but very generally also, a soul of truth in things erroneous.
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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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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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.
Herbert Spencer
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Aggression which is flagitious when committed by one, is not sanctioned when committed by a host.
Herbert Spencer
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Without painting, sculpture, music, poetry, and the emotions produced by natural beauty of every kind, life would lose half its charm.
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