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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.

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
Government
Tyranny
Many
Intense
Kind
Rule
Least
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Less
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Objectionable
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Freest

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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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However insignificant the minority, and however trifling the proposed trespass against their rights, no such trespass is permissible.
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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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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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Ethical ideas and sentiments have to be considered as parts of the phenomena of life at large. We have to deal with man as a product of evolution, with society as a product of evolution, and with moral phenomena as products of evolution.
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The question of questions for the politicians should ever be-What type of social structure am I tending to produce? But this is a question he never entertains.
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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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Lusts are like agues the fit is not always on, and yet the man is not rid of his disease and some men's lusts, like some agues, have not such quick returns as others.
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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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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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This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.
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Do not try to produce an ideal child, it would find no fitness in this world.
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Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.
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Absolute morality is the regulation of conduct in such a way that pain shall not be inflicted.
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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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It becomes possible to admit that plainness may coexist with nobility of nature, and fine features with baseness and yet to hold that mental and physical perfection are fundamentally connected, and will, when the present causes of incongruity have worked themselves out, be ever found united.
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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.
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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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Mental power cannot be got from ill-fed brains.
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