Herbert Spencer

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 lines.

The most important attribute of man as a moral being is the faculty of self-control.

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."

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

Government is essentially immoral.

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.

Anyone who studies the state of things which preceded the French Revolution will see that the tremendous catastrophe came about from so excessive a regulation of men's actions in all their details, and such an enormous drafting away of the products of their actions to maintain the regulating organization, that life was fast becoming impracticable. And if we ask what then made, and now makes, this error possible, we find it to be the political superstition that governmental power is subject to no restraints.

When a man's knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion.

To play billiards well is a sign of an ill-spent youth.