William Graham Sumner Quotes

71 quotes in 1108 categories

• Civil liberty is the status of the man who is guaranteed by law and civil institutions the exclusive employment of all his own powers for…
• If America becomes militant, it will be because its people choose to become such; it will be because they think that war and warlikeness are…
• If you want war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men ever are subject...
• If we put together all that we have learned from anthropology and ethnography about primitive men and primitive society, we perceive that the first task…
• Men never cling to their dreams with such tenacity as at the moment when they are losing faith in them, and know it, but do…
• It used to be believed that the parent had unlimited claims on the child and rights over him. In a truer view of the matter,…
• We shall find that every effort to realize equality necessitates a sacrifice of liberty.
• All history is only one long story to this effect: men have struggled for power over their fellow-men in order that they might win the…
• The lobby is the army of the plutocracy.
• History is only a tiresome repetition of one story.
• The State cannot get a cent for any man without taking it from some other man, and this latter must be a man who has…
• History is only a tiresome repetition of one story. Persons and classes have sought to win possession of the power of the State in order…
• Great captains of industry are as rare as great generals
• Any one who believes that any great enterprise of an industrial character can be started without labor must have little experience of life.
• A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and tendency of things. Nature has set upon him…
• Furthermore, the unearned increment from land appears in the United States as a gain to the first comers, who have here laid the foundations of…
• I have before me a newspaper slip on which a writer expresses the opinion that no one should be allowed to possess more than one…
• I never have known a man of ordinary common-sense who did not urge upon his sons, from earliest childhood, doctrines of economy and the practice…
• It is a beneficent incident of the ownership of land that a pioneer who reduces it to use, and helps to lay the foundations of…
• It is often said that the earth belongs to the race, as if raw land was a boon, or gift.

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