72 quotes
Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts — as the one which, more than any other, ministers to human welfare.
Essays on Education (1861)
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.
Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative (1891)
Man needed one moral constitution to fit him for his original state; he needs another to fit him for his present state; and he has been, is, and will long continue to be, in process of adaptation.
Social Statics (1851)
The ruling classes argue themselves into the belief that property should be represented rather than person — that the landed interest should preponderate. The pauper is thoroughly persuaded that he has a right to relief.
Social Statics (1851)
Rightness expresses of actions, what straightness does of lines; and there can no more be two kinds of right action than there can be two kinds of straight line.
Evil perpetually tends to disappear.
Social Statics (1851)
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.
The Principles of Ethics (1897)
Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive, that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror.
Essays on Education (1861)
The tyranny of Mrs. Grundy is worse than any other tyranny we suffer under.
Essays on Education (1861)
Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all.
The Development Hypothesis (1852)
Influences of various kinds conspire to increase corporate action and decrease individual action.
The Man versus the State (1884)
This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called "natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life."
To the clergy nothing is more obvious than that a state-church is just, and essential to the maintenance of religion. The sinecurist thinks himself rightly indignant at any disregard of his vested interests. And so on throughout society.
Social Statics (1851)
All socialism involves slavery…. That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labours under coercion to satisfy another's desires.
The more specific idea of Evolution now reached is - a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.
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.
The Principles of Ethics (1897)
Time: That which man is always trying to kill, but which ends in killing him.
Passing over the consideration of credibility, and confining ourselves to that of conceivability, we see that Atheism, Pantheism, and Theism, when rigorously analyzed, severally prove to be absolutely unthinkable.
Government being simply an agent employed in common by a number of individuals to secure to them certain advantages, the very nature of the connection implies that it is for each to say whether he will employ such an agent or not.
Social Statics (1851)
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.
Social Statics (1851)