Category: Thought

The mental action by which from moment to moment we thus, in ways commonly too rapid to observe, class the objects and acts around, and regulate our conduct accordingly, has been otherwise named by some, and especially by Professor Bain, ‘discrimination.’ Intelligence is, in its every act, carried on by discrimination; and has advanced from its lowest stages to its highest by increasing powers of discrimination. It has done this for the sufficient reason that during the evolution of life under all its forms, increase of it has been furthered by practice or habit as well as by survival of the fittest; since good discrimination has been a means of saving life, and lack of it a cause of losing life.

Herbert Spencer, Principles of Ethics, Vol. 2, Part V: “Negative Beneficence” (1893), Chapter 1: “The Kinds of Altruism.”

There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.

If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves?

Herbert Spencer, “The New Toryism,” The Man Versus the State (1884).

Whoever is fortunate enough to be an American citizen came into the greatest inheritance man has ever enjoyed. He has had the benefit of every heroic and intellectual effort men have made for many thousands of years, realized at last. If Americans should now turn back, submit again to slavery, it would be a betrayal so base the human race might better perish.

Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine (1943), p. 292.

If we adopt pessimism as a creed, and with it accept the implication that life in general being an evil should be put an end to, then there is no ethical warrant for these actions by which life is maintained: the whole question drops. But if we adopt either the optimist view or the meliorist view — if we say that life on the whole yields more pleasure than pain; or that it is on the way to become such that it will yield more pleasure than pain; then these actions by which life is maintained are justified, and there results a warrant for the freedom to perform them. Those who hold that life is valuable, hold, by implication, that men ought not to be prevented from carrying on life-​sustaining activities. In other words, if it is said to be ‘right’ that they should carry them on, then, by permutation, we get the assertion that they ‘have a right’ to carry them on. Clearly the conception of ‘natural rights’ originates in recognition of the truth that if life is justifiable, there must be a justification for the performance of acts essential to its preservation; and, therefore, a justification for those liberties and claims which make such acts possible.

Herbert Spencer, “The Great Political Superstition,” The Man versus The State (1884).

There is literally no one in the public sphere that you or I can trust.

Drew Pinsky in conversation with Winston Marshall, “Dr Drew Analyses Kamala’s Cognitive Abilities” (November 1, 2024).