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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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Herbert Spencer
Born: 1824
Born: April 27
Anthropologist
Botanist
Economist
Journalist
Philosopher
Psychologist
Sociologist
Writer
Derby
Derbyshire
Spencert
Gerbert Spencer
Accept
Evidence
Accepting
Idea
Unsupported
Spirit
Disembodied
Cannot
Wholly
Ideas
Spirits
Atheism

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Religion has been compelled by science to give up one after another of its dogmas. . . .
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Life is not for learning nor is life for working, but learning and working are for life.
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Only when Genius is married to Science can the highest results be produced.
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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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Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.
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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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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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This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.
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Mental power cannot be got from ill-fed brains.
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Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.
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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.
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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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Without painting, sculpture, music, poetry, and the emotions produced by natural beauty of every kind, life would lose half its charm.
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Pervading all nature we may see at work a stern discipline , which is a little cruel that it may be very kind.
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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.
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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 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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In the supremacy of self-control consists one of the perfections of the ideal man.
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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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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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