William Graham Sumner Short Quotes

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He who would be well taken care of must take care of himself.

William Graham Sumner
There is no such thing on this earth as something for nothing.

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

William Graham Sumner
The aggregation of large fortunes is not at all a thing to be regretted.

William Graham Sumner
The great force for forging a society into a solid mass has always been war.

William Graham Sumner
Hunger, love, vanity, and fear. There are four great motives of human action.

William Graham Sumner
There ought to be no laws to guarantee property against the folly of its possessors.

William Graham Sumner
We shall find that every effort to realize equality necessitates a sacrifice of liberty.

William Graham Sumner
It is often said that the earth belongs to the race, as if raw land was a boon, or gift.

William Graham Sumner
The taxing power is especially something after which the reformer's finger always itches.

William Graham Sumner
Where torture has been long applied we find that it is developed to grades of incredible horror.

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
There is no device whatever to be invented for securing happiness without industry, economy, and virtue.

William Graham Sumner
There is no boon in nature. All the blessings we enjoy are the fruits of labor, toil, self-denial, and study.

William Graham Sumner
If you want war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men ever are subject...

William Graham Sumner
The truth is that cupidity, selfishness, envy, malice, lust, vindictiveness, are constant vices of human nature.

William Graham Sumner
Nine-tenths of our measures for preventing vice are really protective towards it, because they ward off the penalty.

William Graham Sumner
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
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
We live in a war of two antagonistic ethical philosophies, the ethical policy taught in the books and schools, and the success policy.

William Graham Sumner
What is the real relation between happiness and goodness? It is only within a few generations that men have found courage to say that there is none.

William Graham Sumner
It is remarkable that jealousy of individual property in land often goes along with very exaggerated doctrines of tribal or national property in land.

William Graham Sumner
We throw all our attention on the utterly idle question whether A has done as well as B, when the only question is whether A has done as well as he could.

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
The men who start out with the notion that the world owes them a living generally find that the world pays its 'debt' in the penitentiary or the poor house.

William Graham Sumner
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 a new State.

William Graham Sumner
A good father believes that he does wisely to encourage enterprise, productive skill, prudent self-denial, and judicious expenditure on the part of his son.

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
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
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 million dollars' worth of property.

William Graham Sumner