C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Herbert Spencer
Do not try to produce an ideal child, it would find no fitness in this world.
If on one day we find the fast-spreading recognition of popular rights accompanied by a silent, growing perception of the rights of women, we also find it accompanied by a tendency towards a system of non-coercive education—that is, towards a practical illustration of the rights of children.
In the supremacy of self-control consists one of the perfections of the ideal man.
It is a commonly observed fact that the enslavement of women is invariably associated with a low type of social life, and that, conversely, her elevation towards an equality with man uniformly accompanies progress.
It must be admitted that the conception of virtue cannot be separated from the conception of happiness-producing conduct.
Liberty is not the right of one, but of all.
Mother, when your children are irritable, do not make them more so by scolding and fault-finding, but correct their irritability by good nature and mirthfulness. Irritability comes from errors in food, bad air, too little sleep, a necessity for change of scene and surroundings; from confinement in close rooms, and lack of sunshine.
Never educate a child to be a gentleman or lady alone, but to be a man, a woman.
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 child takes most of his nature of the mother, besides speech, manners, and inclination.
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 favored races in the struggle for life.”
What a cage is to the wild beast, law is to the selfish man. Restraint is for the savage, the rapacious, the violent; not for the just, the gentle, the benevolent. All necessity for external force implies a morbid state. Dungeons for the felon, a straightjacket for the maniac, crutches for the lame, stays for the weak-backed; for the infirm of purpose, a master; for the foolish, a guide; but for the sound mind in a sound body, none of these.