William Graham Sumner - Man Quotes

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If I want to be free from any other man's dictation, I must understand that I can have no other man under my control.

William Graham Sumner
The man who started with the notion that the world owed him a living would once more find, as he does now, that the world pays him its debt in the state prison.

William Graham Sumner
The forgotten man... He works, he votes, generally he prays, but his chief business in life is to pay.

William Graham Sumner
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 his own welfare.

William Graham Sumner
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 of accumulation.

William Graham Sumner
The type and formula of most schemes of philanthropy or humanitarianism is this: A and B put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to do for D. The radical vice of all these schemes, from a sociological point of view, is that C is not allowed a voice in the matter, and his position, character, and interests, as well as the ultimate effects on society through C's interests, are entirely overlooked. I call C the Forgotten Man.

William Graham Sumner
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 produced and saved it. This latter is the Forgotten Man

William Graham Sumner
A fool is wiser in his own house than a sage is in another man's house.

William Graham Sumner
Here we are, then, once more back at the old doctrine - Laissez faire. Let us translate it into blunt English, and it will read, Mind your own business. It is nothing but the doctrine of liberty. Let every man be happy in his own way.

William Graham Sumner
If any student of social science comes to appreciate the case of the Forgotten Man, he will become an unflinching advocate of strict scientific thinking in sociology, and a hard-hearted skeptic as regards any scheme of social amelioration. He will always want to know, Who and where is the Forgotten Man in this case, who will have to pay for it all?

William Graham Sumner
It is the greatest folly of which a man can be capable to sit down with a slate and pencil to plan out a new social world.

William Graham Sumner
Every man and woman in society has one big duty. That is, to take care of his or her own self. This is a social duty. For, fortunately, the matter stands so that the duty of making the best of one's self individually is not a separate thing from the duty of filling one's place in society, but the two are one, and the latter is accomplished when the former is done

William Graham Sumner