Quotes from 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.

Men educated in [the critical habit of thought]are slow to believe. They can hold things as possible or probable in all degrees, without certainty and without pain.

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.

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.

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

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

It generally troubles them [the reformers] not a whit that their remedy implies a complete reconstruction of society, or even a reconstitution of human nature.

What we prepare for is what we shall get.

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

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 the process of decline and dissolution by which she removes things which have survived their usefulness.

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

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 not dare yet to confess it to themselves.

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

The waste of capital, in proportion to the total capital, in this country between 1800 and 1850, in the attempts which were made to establish means of communication and transportation, was enormous.

Property left to a child may soon be lost; but the inheritance of virtue--a good name an unblemished reputation--will abide forever. If those who are toiling for wealth to leave their children, would but take half the pains to secure for them virtuous habits, how much more serviceable would they be. The largest property may be wrested from a child, but virtue will stand by him to the last.

Among respectable people a man who took upon himself the cares and expenses of a family before he had secured a regular trade or profession, or had accumulated some capital, and who allowed his wife to lose caste, and his children to be dirty, ragged, and neglected, would be severely blamed by the public opinion of the community. The

Taking men as they have been and are, they are subjects of passion, emotion, and instinct. Only

The idea of the "free man," as we understand it, is the product of a revolt against mediaeval and feudal ideas; and

Capital is only formed by self-denial, and

is not altogether a matter of fanfaronade when the American citizen calls himself a "sovereign." A member of a free democracy is, in a sense, a sovereign. He

Now, the plan of plundering each other produces nothing. It only wastes. All

The man who has capital has secured his future, won leisure which he can employ in winning secondary objects of necessity and advantage, and emancipated himself from those things in life which are gross and belittling. The

I know that the economists who say that if we could transmute lead into gold, it would certainly do us no good and might do great harm, are still regarded as unworthy of belief. Do

A member of a free democracy is, in a sense, a sovereign. He has no superior. He