Herbert Spencer Quotes

The more we study the Indian's character the more we appreciate the marked distinction between the civilized being and the real savage.

If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.

The modern civilized State has been developed by the antagonism between individual and social interests, which has transformed primitive Society into Civilization.

History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.

There was an age, however, when the transition from savagery to civilization, with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture, took place for the first time.

Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.

Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.

The history of the world demonstrates that man becomes what we call civilized by increasing his wants.

No community ever did or ever can emerge unassisted by external helps from a state of utter barbarism into anything that can be called civilization

My fear is that in general terms the evolution of the political process proceeds at the same pace as the evolution of the species and I do not myself believe that that is quite fast enough

The history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.

Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.

You know, when you get to the New World and you develop your three branches of government and you have a civil society, you can just jettison all the barbarism I recommended in the first books.

There is as yet no civilized society, but only a society in the process of becoming civilized. There is as yet no civilized nation, but only nations in the process of becoming civilized. From this standpoint, we can now speak of a collective task of humankind. The task of humanity is to build a genuine civilization.

Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.

It is the object of learning, not only to satisfy the curiosity and perfect the spirits of ordinary men, but also to advance civilization.

Work is not a curse; it is the prerogative of intelligence, the only means to manhood, and the measure of civilization.

The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women.

Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it was a thousand years ago.

If education is beaten by training, civilization dies.

The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual.

Civilization is an enormous device for economizing knowledge,.

There are many faculties in man, each of which takes its turn of activity, and that faculty which is paramount in any period and exerts itself through the strongest nation, determines the civility of that age: and each age thinks its own the perfection of reason.