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Herbert Spencer Quotes
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Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era.

Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. As a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, religion, anthropology, economics, political theory, philosophy, literature, astronomy, biology, sociology, and psychology. During his lifetime he achieved tremendous authority, mainly in English-speaking academia. "The only other English philosopher to have achieved anything like such widespread popularity was Bertrand Russell, and that was in the 20th century." Spencer was "the single most famous European intellectual in the closing decades of the nineteenth century" but his influence declined sharply after 1900: "Who now reads Spencer?" asked Talcott Parsons in 1937.Spencer is best known for the expression "survival of the fittest", which he coined in Principles of Biology , after reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. This term strongly suggests natural selection, yet as Spencer extended evolution into realms of sociology and ethics, he also made use of Lamarckism. Wikipedia  

✵ 27. April 1820 – 8. December 1903
Herbert Spencer photo
Herbert Spencer: 81   quotes 4   likes

Herbert Spencer Quotes

“Evolution is definable as a change from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.”

Herbert Spencer

Pt. II, The Knowable; Ch. XV, The Law of Evolution (continued)
First Principles (1862)

Change

“Equity knows no difference of sex. In its vocabulary the word man must be understood in a generic, and not in a specific sense.”

Herbert Spencer book Social Statics

Pt. II, Ch. 16 : The Rights of Women
Social Statics (1851)

Sex , Sense

“Evil perpetually tends to disappear.”

Herbert Spencer book Social Statics

Part I, Ch. 2 : The Evanescence of Evil, § 2
Social Statics (1851)

Evil

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

Herbert Spencer

On the Origin and Function of Music
Essays on Education (1861)

Art , Music

“There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance — that principle is contempt prior to investigation.”

Herbert Spencer

Commonly attributed to Spencer, information provided in The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When (2006) by Ralph Keyes and The Survival of a Fitting Quotation. (2005) by Michael StGeorge http://anonpress.org/spencer/, indicates the attribution may have originated with the book [w:The_Big_Book_(Alcoholics_Anonymous)|Alcoholics Anonymous]]. It was used exactly as written above in the personal stories section of the first edition in 1939 and in 'Appendix II: Spiritual Experience' of all subsequent editions.
: "Contempt prior to examination" was a phrase used by William Paley, the 18th-century English Christian apologist. In A View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794), he wrote:
::The infidelity of the Gentile world, and that more especially of men of rank and learning in it, is resolved into a principle which, in my judgment, will account for the inefficacy of any argument, or any evidence whatever, viz. contempt prior to examination.
:Paley's characterization of non-believers was later modified and used by other religious authors who uniformly attributed their words to Paley. In Anglo-Israel or, The British Nation: The lost Tribes of Israel (1879), Rev. William H. Poole may have been the first to render the quotation in its more familiar and enduring form:
::There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all argument, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance. This principle is, contempt prior to examination.
:Various authors following Rev. Poole would offer new iterations of the quotation into the early decades of the 20th century. Most of these credited William Paley, but by the early 1930s the first obscure publications to falsely attribute this quote to Spencer emerged. Its usage for decades since as a maxim in Alcoholics Anonymous and the twelve-step recovery community has popularized its erroneous association with Herbert Spencer.
Misattributed

“That the uneducated and the ill-educated should think the hypothesis that all races of beings, man inclusive, may in process of time have been evolved from the simplest monad, a ludicrous one, is not to be wondered at. But for the physiologist, who knows that every individual being is so evolved—who knows, further, that in their earliest condition the germs of all plants and animals whatever are so similar, "that there is no appreciable distinction amongst them, which would enable it to be determined whether a particular molecule is the germ of a Conferva or of an Oak, of a Zoophyte or of a Man";—for him to make a difficulty of the matter is inexcusable.”

Herbert Spencer

Spencer here references William Benjamin Carpenter, Principles of Comparative Physiology http://books.google.com/books?id=ovgEAAAAYAAJ& see p. 473
The Development Hypothesis (1852)

Education , Thinking , Time , Animals

“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.”

Herbert Spencer book Social Statics

Pt. III, Ch. 25 : Poor-Laws
Social Statics (1851)

Strong

“Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.”

Herbert Spencer

Pt. I, The Unknowable; Ch. V, The Reconciliation
First Principles (1862)

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

Herbert Spencer

Pt. I, The Unknowable; Ch. I, Religion and Science
First Principles (1862)

Past

“Every cause produces more than one effect.”

Herbert Spencer

On Progress: Its Law and Cause
Essays on Education (1861)

“The supporters of the Development Hypothesis… can show that any existing species—animal or vegetable—when placed under conditions different from its previous ones, immediately begins to undergo certain changes fitting it for the new conditions.”

Herbert Spencer

They can show that in successive generations these changes continue; until, ultimately, the new conditions become the natural ones. They can show that in cultivated plants, in domesticated animals, and in the several races of men, such alterations have taken place. They can show that the degrees of difference so produced are often, as in dogs, greater than those on which distinctions of species are in other cases founded.
The Development Hypothesis (1852)

Animals , Support , Change