Top 140 Herbert Spencer Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Whatever fosters militarism makes for barbarism; whatever fosters peace makes for civilization.”

— Herbert Spencer

102. “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.”

— Herbert Spencer

103. “No philosopher’s stone of a constitution can produce golden conduct from leaden instincts.”

— Herbert Spencer

104. “Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts – as the one which, more than any other, ministers to the human spirit.”

— Herbert Spencer

105. “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

106. “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

107. “We do not commonly see in a tax a diminution of freedom, and yet it clearly is one.”

— Herbert Spencer

108. “Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.”

— Herbert Spencer

109. “We have a priori reasons for believing that in every sentence there is some one order of words more effective than any other; and that this order is the one which presents the elements of the proposition in the succession in which they may be most readily put together.”

— Herbert Spencer

110. “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

111. “Before he can remake his society, his society must make him.”

— Herbert Spencer

112. “The presumption that any current opinion is not wholly false, gains in strength according to the number of its adherents.”

— Herbert Spencer

113. “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.”

— Herbert Spencer

114. “Liberty is not the right of one, but of all.”

— Herbert Spencer

115. “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?”

— Herbert Spencer

116. “Thus poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially impressive partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech, and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances of excitement.”

— Herbert Spencer

117. “The home is the most important factor in civilization, and that civilization is to be measured at different stages largely by the development in the home.”

— Herbert Spencer

118. “A nation’s institutions and beliefs are determined by it’s character.”

— Herbert Spencer

119. “We too often forget that not only is there ‘a soul of goodness in things evil,’ but very generally also, a soul of truth in things erroneous.”

— Herbert Spencer

120. “The “Creed of Christendom” is alien to my nature, both emotional and intellectual.”

— Herbert Spencer

121. “Aggression which is flagitious when committed by one, is not sanctioned when committed by a host.”

— Herbert Spencer

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

— Herbert Spencer

123. “The idea of disembodied spirits is wholly unsupported by evidence, and I cannot accept it.”

— Herbert Spencer

124. “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

125. “Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror.”

— Herbert Spencer

126. “Without painting, sculpture, music, poetry, and the emotions produced by natural beauty of every kind, life would lose half its charm.”

— Herbert Spencer

127. “In literary art, as in the art of the architect, the painter, the musician, signs that the artist is thinking of his own achievement more than of his subject always offend me.”

— Herbert Spencer

128. “An argument fatal to the communist theory, is suggested by the fact, that a desire for property is one of the elements of our nature.”

— Herbert Spencer

129. “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

130. “Divine right of kings means the divine right of anyone who can get uppermost.”

— Herbert Spencer

131. “I had a great dislike to the annoyances entailed by baggage; and it was always with some feeling of elation that I cut myself free from everything but what I could carry about me. Like children, portmanteaus and trunks are hostages to fortune.”

— Herbert Spencer

132. “The liberty the citizen enjoys is to be measured not by governmental machinery he lives under, whether representative or other, but by the paucity of restraints it imposes upon him.”

— Herbert Spencer

133. “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.”

— Herbert Spencer

134. “It is a commonly observed fact that the enslavement of women is invariably associated with a low type of social life, and that, conversely, her elevation towards an equality with man uniformly accompanies progress.”

— Herbert Spencer

135. “In societies of low civilization, there is no money.”

— Herbert Spencer

136. “Though, probably, no competent geologist would contend that the European classification of strata is applicable to all other parts of the globe, yet most, if not all geologists, write as though it were so.”

— Herbert Spencer

137. “Agnostics are people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of matters, about which metaphysicians and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatize with the utmost confidence.”

— Herbert Spencer

138. “Crime is incurable, save by that gradual process of adaptation to the social state which humanity is undergoing. Crime is the continual breaking out of the old unadapted nature – the index of a character unfitted to its conditions – and only as fast as the unfitness diminishes can crime diminish.”

— Herbert Spencer

139. “There can be little question that good composition is far less dependent upon acquaintance with its laws, than upon practice and natural aptitude. A clear head, a quick imagination, and a sensitive ear, will go far towards making all rhetorical precepts needless.”

— Herbert Spencer

140. “They who employ force by proxy are as much responsible for that force as though they employed it themselves.”

— Herbert Spencer

141. “In assuming any office besides its essential one, the State begins to lose the power of fulfilling its essential one.”

— Herbert Spencer

142. “The fact disclosed by a survey of the past that majorities have been wrong must not blind us to the complementary fact that majorities have usually not been entirely wrong.”

— Herbert Spencer

143. “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.”

— Herbert Spencer

144. “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

145. “We have repeatedly observed that while any whole is evolving, there is always going on an evolution of the parts into which it divides itself; but we have not observed that this equally holds of the totality of things, which is made up of parts within parts from the greatest down to the smallest.”

— Herbert Spencer

146. “Men are not rational beings, as commonly supposed. A man is a bundle of instincts, feelings, sentiments, which severally seek their gratification, and those which are in power get hold of reason and use it to their own ends, and exclude all other sentiments and feelings from power.”

— Herbert Spencer

147. “The belief in the innate virtues of constitutions is as baseless as was the belief in the natural superiorities of royal personages.”

— Herbert Spencer