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No philosopher's stone of a constitution can produce golden conduct from leaden instincts.

Herbert Spencer

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Herbert Spencer
Born: 1824
Born: April 27
Anthropologist
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Psychologist
Sociologist
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Derby
Derbyshire
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Gerbert Spencer
Golden
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More quotes by Herbert Spencer

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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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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.
Herbert Spencer
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The child takes most of his nature of the mother, besides speech, manners, and inclination.
Herbert Spencer
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Feudalism, serfdom, slavery — all tyrannical institutions, are merely the most vigorous kinds of rule, springing out of, and necessary to, a bad state of man. The progress from these is in all cases the same — less government.
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
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Marriage: A word which should be pronounced mirage.
Herbert Spencer
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Every unpunished delinquency has a family of delinquencies.
Herbert Spencer
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This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.
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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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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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.
Herbert Spencer
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Policeman are soldiers who act alone soldiers are policeman who act in unison.
Herbert Spencer
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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.
Herbert Spencer
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Government is essentially immoral. The State employs evil weapons to subjugate evil, and is alike contaminated by the objects with which it deals, and the means by which it works.
Herbert Spencer
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Music ministers to human welfare more than any other art.
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.
Herbert Spencer
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The most important attribute of man as a moral being is the faculty of self-control.
Herbert Spencer
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How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.
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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Our lives are universally shortened by our ignorance.
Herbert Spencer