Herbert Spencer Quotes

Virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do.

Ethics are pre-determined and a matter of discovery, not a evolved concept.

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.

Morals consist of political morals, commercial morals, ecclesiastical morals, and morals.

I take the ethical truths to be the stable elements that emerge out of ethical progress and that are retained under further ethical progress.

The Bible improved my ethical IQ. I started to act like a good person. I tried not to gossip, and lie, and covet, and just by pretending I was a good person, I think I actually became a little bit better of a person. I'm not Gandhi or Angelina Jolie, but it was a baby step.

I will rather suffer a thousand wrongs than offer one. I have always found that to strive with a superior is injurious; with an equal, doubtful; with an inferior, sordid and base; with any, full of unquietness.

Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.

Do you know what morals are? Morals are an obedience to rules that people laid down to help you live among them.

The aim of eugenics is to represent each class or sect by its best specimens; that done, to leave them to work out their common civilization in their own way.

Moral standards cannot be changed by battle and cannot be changed by ballot.

The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind.

Moral progress has consisted in the main of protest against cruel customs, and of attempts to enlarge human sympathy.

That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.

The most important advance that the West has yet made is to develop a secularist moral tradition

Those who are most moral are farthest from the problem.

Experience is no more transferable in morals than in art.

For centuries, faith has helped us overcome problems and helped us work to achieve a more perfect union. It has inspired the many leaders who played a key role in abolishing slavery, protecting civil rights and, hopefully one day, becoming a nation where all life from conception to natural death is protected.

Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.

Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.

We cannot but think there is something like a fallacy in Mr. Buckle's theory that the advance of mankind is necessarily in the direction of science, and not in that of morals.

Liberty and morality had to win their way slowly over many centuries, until finally expanding liberty made possible the great technological advance of the Industrial Revolution and the flowering of modern capitalism.

It's my opinion that every one I know has morals, though I wouldn't like to ask. I know I have. But I'd rather teach them than practice them any day. "Give them to others"-that's my motto.

It is always so much easier to be moral than it is to be spiritual.