Herbert Spencer

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.

Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.

As there must be moderation in other things, so there must be moderation in self-criticism.

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.

Originally, ethics has no existence apart from religion, which holds it in solution.

The pursuit of individual happiness within those limits prescribed by social conditions, is the first requisite to the attainment of the greatest general happiness.

If insistence on them tends to unsettle established systems ... self-evident truths are by most people silently passed over; or else there is a tacit refusal to draw from them the most obvious inferences.

People ... become so preoccupied with the means by which an end is achieved, as eventually to mistake it for the end.

The universal basis of co-operation is the proportioning of benefits received to services rendered.

The essential trait in the moral consciousness, is the control of some feeling or feelings by some other feeling or feelings.

Every pleasure raises the tide of life; every pain lowers the tide of life.

The primary use of knowledge is for such guidance of conduct under all circumstances as shall make living complete. All other uses of knowledge are secondary.

The Republican form of government is the highest form of government; but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature — a type nowhere at present existing.

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.

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.

Under the natural course of things each citizen tends towards his fittest function. Those who are competent to the kind of work they undertake, succeed, and, in the average of cases, are advanced in proportion to their efficiency; while …

The saying that beauty is but skin deep is but a skin-deep saying.

Be it or be it not true that Man is shapen in iniquity and conceived in sin, it is unquestionably true that Government is begotten of aggression, and by aggression.

All socialism involves slavery.

Influences of various kinds conspire to increase corporate action and decrease individual action.

We have unmistakable proof that throughout all past time, there has been a ceaseless devouring of the weak by the strong.

With a higher moral nature will come a restriction on the multiplication of the inferior.

It cannot but happen that those individuals whose functions are most out of equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces, will be those to die; and that those will survive whose functions happen to be most nearly in …

If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give …