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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.

Herbert Spencer

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Herbert Spencer
Born: 1824
Born: April 27
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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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Do not try to produce an ideal child, it would find no fitness in this world.
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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.
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The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.
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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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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.
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The freest form of government is only the least objectionable form. The rule of the many by the few we call tyranny: the rule of the few by the many is tyranny also only of a less intense kind.
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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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All socialism involves slavery.
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Only when Genius is married to Science can the highest results be produced.
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It must be admitted that the conception of virtue cannot be separated from the conception of happiness-producing conduct.
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This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.
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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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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.
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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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The presumption that any current opinion is not wholly false, gains in strength according to the number of its adherents.
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Science is organized knowledge.
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Time: That which man is always trying to kill, but which ends in killing him.
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The most important attribute of man as a moral being is the faculty of self-control.
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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.
Herbert Spencer