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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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Herbert Spencer
Born: 1824
Born: April 27
Anthropologist
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Gerbert Spencer
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Marriage: A word which should be pronounced mirage.
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The idea of disembodied spirits is wholly unsupported by evidence, and I cannot accept it.
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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.
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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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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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The universal basis of co-operation is the proportioning of benefits received to services rendered.
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Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.
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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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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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No place, no company, no age, no person is temptation-free let no man boast that he was never tempted, let him not be high-minded, but fear, for he may be surprised in that very instant wherein he boasteth that he was never tempted at all.
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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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Do not try to produce an ideal child, it would find no fitness in this world.
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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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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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The forces which are working out the great scheme of perfect happiness, taking no account of incidental suffering, exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their way, with the same sternness that they exterminate beasts of prey and herds of useless ruminants.
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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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All socialism involves slavery.
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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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Those whose hardships are set forth in pamphlets and proclaimed in sermons and speeches which echo throughout society, are assumed to be all worthy souls, grievously wronged and none of them are thought of as bearing the penalties of their misdeeds.
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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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