All Quotes

"Strong as it looks at the outset, State-agency perpetually disappoints every one. Puny as are its first stages, private efforts daily achieve results that astound the world."

"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools."

"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 primary use of knowledge is for such guidance of conduct under all circumstances as shall make living complete. All other uses of knowledge are secondary."

"Every pleasure raises the tide of life; every pain lowers the tide of life."

"The essential trait in the moral consciousness, is the control of some feeling or feelings by some other feeling or feelings."

"The universal basis of co-operation is the proportioning of benefits received to services rendered."

"People ... become so preoccupied with the means by which an end is achieved, as eventually to mistake it for the end. Just as money, which is a means of satisfying wants, comes to be regarded by a miser as the sole thing to be worked for, leaving the wants unsatisfied; so the conduct men have found preferable because most conducive to happiness, has come to be thought of as intrinsically preferable: not only to be made a proximate end (which it should be), but to be made an ultimate end, to the exclusion of the true ultimate end."

"Blest is that government where no art thrives."

"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 pursuit of individual happiness within those limits prescribed by social conditions, is the first requisite to the attainment of the greatest general happiness."

"He who carries self-regard far enough to keep himself in good health and high spirits, in the first place thereby becomes an immediate source of happiness to those around, and in the second place maintains the ability to increase their happiness by altruistic actions. But one whose bodily vigour and mental health are undermined by self-sacrifice carried too far, in the first place becomes to those around a cause of depression, and in the second place renders himself incapable, or less capable, of actively furthering their welfare. In estimating conduct we must remember that there are those who by their joyousness beget joy in others, and that there are those who by their melancholy cast a gloom on every circle they enter."

"Originally, ethics has no existence apart from religion, which holds it in solution."

"How often misused words generate misleading thoughts!"

"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."

"As there must be moderation in other things, so there must be moderation in self-criticism. Perpetual contemplation of our own actions produces a morbid consciousness, quite unlike that normal consciousness accompanying right actions spontaneously done; and from a state of unstable equilibrium long maintained by effort, there is apt to be a fall towards stable equilibrium, in which the primitive nature reasserts itself. Retrogression rather than progression may hence result."

"Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man."

"When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don't care if they are shot themselves."

"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."

"Spencer argued in a very articulate way for the communality of these processes of self-organization, and used his ideas to make a theory of sociology. However, he was not able to put these ideas into mathematical form or argue them from first principles. And no one else has, either — doing so is perhaps the central problem in the study of complex systems."

"One of the factors that caused Spencer's ideas to lose popularity was social Darwinism... Social evolution is different from biological evolution: it's faster, it's Lamarckian, and it makes even heavier use of altruism and cooperation than biological evolution does. None of this was well understood at the time."

"In the words of Herbert Spencer, I would say that “in proportion as the principle of voluntary cooperation more and more characterizes the social type, the implied assertion of equality in... rights become the fundamental requirement of... law.""

"Herbert Spencer, who was ever undone by his love of classification."

"Spencer had a photo of Marian (George Eliot) in his bedroom until the day he died. The sisters who kept house for him in the 1890s used to tease him about it. "What a long nose she had! She must have been very difficult to kiss, Mr Spencer!" "Yes indeed! he brightly acquiesced, to our intense delight at the apparent admission. He laughingly protested he was speaking theoretically; but would Herbert Spencer, the philosopher, have generalised from an a priori reasoning?""

"What is Logicke but the highe waie to wrangling, contayning in it a world of bibble babble. Neede we anie of your Greeke, Latine, Hebrue, or anie such gibbrige, when wee have the word of God in English?"

"Evermore mayst thou be canonized as the Nonparreille of impious epistlers."

"The Sun shineth as well on the good as the bad: God from on high beholdeth all the workers of iniquity, as well as the upright of heart."

"O, 'tis a precious apophthegmatical pedant who will find matter enough to dilate a whole day of the first invention of “Fy, fa, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.”"

"Dreaming is no other than groaning, while sleep our surgeon hath us in cure."

"A dream is nothing else but the echo of our conceits in the day."

"A dream is nothing else but a bubbling scum or froth of the fancy, which the day hath left undigested; or an after-feast made of the fragments of idle imaginations."

"Fair Summer droops, droop men and beasts therefore: So fair a summer look for never more. All good things vanish, less than in a day, Peace, plenty, pleasure, suddenly decay. Go not yet away, bright soul of the sad year; The earth is hell when thou leav'st to appear."

"Spring, the sweet spring, is the year's pleasant King, Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring, Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing, Cuckoo, jug, jug, pu wee, to witta woo!"

"Lambs frisk and play, the shepherds pipe all day."

"Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss, This world uncertain is, Fond are life’s lustful joys, Death proves them all but toys, None from his darts can fly; I am sick, I must die: Lord, have mercy on us."

"Beauty is but a flower Which wrinkles will devour."

"Brightness falls from the air, Queens have died young and fair, Dust hath closed Helen's eye. I am sick, I must die: Lord, have mercy on us."

"Strength stoops unto the grave, Worms feed on Hector brave, Swords may not fight with fate, Earth still holds ope her gate. Come, come, the bells do cry. I am sick, I must die."

"From winter, plague, and pestilence, good Lord, deliver us."

"Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen."

"I love things made out of animals," Sedaris says, holding a knife with a hoof for a handle. "It's just so funny to think of someone saying, 'I need a letter opener. I guess I'll have to kill a deer.'"

"Shit is the tofu of cursing."

"I read "Revolutionary Road" once a year. Aside from its word-by-word construction, I love how his characters deceive themselves."

"What did Trish's mother say when her daughter, heartbroken over her breakup with Randy, came to her in search of love and understanding? 'If you're looking for sympathy you can find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.'"

"Last Christmas I received a set of golf clubs that, my father likes to remind me, cost a goddamned fortune. He says that he would give his right arm for such a beautiful set of clubs."

"Over Christmas we looked through boxes of family pictures and played a game we call 'Find Mom, find Mom's cigarettes.' There's one in every picture. We've got photos of her pregnant, leaning toward a lit match, and others of her posing with her newborn babies, the smoke forming a halo above our heads. These pictures gave us a warm feeling. She smoked in the bathtub, where we'd find her drowned butts lined up in a neat row beside the shampoo bottle. She smoked through meals, and often used her half-empty plate as an ashtray. Mom's theory was that if you cooked the meal and did the dishes, you were allowed to use your plate however you liked."

"'Of course he died,' the window washer said. 'You can't take more than a four-storey fall, not in this town anyway. Then Jeffrey Lee got off the phone and said that, given a choice, he'd rather fall from a higher floor as it would allow more time for his life to flash before his eyes. The window man said that all depends on the life you led."

"I Photo Elfed all day for a variety of Santas and it struck me that many of the parents don't allow their children to speak at all. A child sits upon Santa's lap and the parents say, 'All right now, Amber, tell Santa what you want. Tell him you want a Baby Alive and My Pretty Ballerina and that winter coat you saw in the catalog.' The parents name the gifts they have already bought. They don't want to hear the word 'pony' or 'television set,' so they talk through the entire visit, placing words in the child's mouth. When the child hops off the lap, the parents address their children, each and every time, with, 'What do you say to Santa?' The child says, 'Thank you, Santa.' It is sad because you would like to believe that everyone is unique and then they disappoint you every time by being exactly the same, asking for the same things, reciting the exact same lines as though they have been handed a script. All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to the fingerprints."

""You kids think you invented sex," my mother was fond of saying. But hadn't we? With no instruction manual or federally enforced training period, didn't we all come away feeling we'd discovered something unspeakably modern? What produced in others a feeling of exhilaration left Jason and me with a mortifying sense of guilt. We fled the room as if, in our fumblings, we had uncapped some virus we still might escape if we ran fast enough. Had one of the counselors not caught me scaling the fence, I felt certain I could have made it back to Raleigh by morning, skittering across the surface of the ocean like one of those lizards often featured on television wildlife programs."

"It occurred to me that everything we buy has been poked or packaged by some unfortunate nitwit with a hairnet and a wad of cotton stuffed into his ears. Every ear of corn, every chocolate-coated raisin or shoelace. Every barbeque tong, paper hat, and store-bought mitten arrives with a history of abject misery. Vegetarians look at a pork roast thinking about the animal. I'd now look at them wondering whose job it was to package the shallow Styrofoam trays."