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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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Herbert Spencer
Born: 1824
Born: April 27
Anthropologist
Botanist
Economist
Journalist
Philosopher
Psychologist
Sociologist
Writer
Derby
Derbyshire
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Gerbert Spencer
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More quotes by Herbert Spencer

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Government is essentially immoral.
Herbert Spencer
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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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Much dearer be the things which come through hard distress.
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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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In the supremacy of self-control consists one of the perfections of the ideal man.
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People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal.
Herbert Spencer
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If on one day we find the fast-spreading recognition of popular rights accompanied by a silent, growing perception of the rights of women, we also find it accompanied by a tendency towards a system of non-coercive education--that is, towards a practical illustration of the rights of children.
Herbert Spencer
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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.
Herbert Spencer
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Religion has been compelled by science to give up one after another of its dogmas. . . .
Herbert Spencer
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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.
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Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.
Herbert Spencer
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Time: That which man is always trying to kill, but which ends in killing him.
Herbert Spencer
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It is the function of parents to see that their children habitually experience the true consequences of their conduct.
Herbert Spencer
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A nation's institutions and beliefs are determined by it's character.
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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All socialism involves slavery. That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labours under coercion to satisfy anothers desires.
Herbert Spencer
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The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many in shallows and in miseries, are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence.
Herbert Spencer
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The saying that beauty is but skin deep, is but a skin-deep saying.
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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Strong as it looks at the outset, State-agency perpetually disappoints every one. Puny as are its first stages, private efforts daily achieve results that astound the world.
Herbert Spencer