Quotes from William Graham Sumner

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

The Forgotten Man is delving away in patient industry, supporting his family, paying his taxes, casting his vote, supporting the church and the school, reading his newspaper, and cheering for the politician of his admiration, but he is the only one for whom there is no provision in the great scramble and the big divide.

History is only a tiresome repetition of one story.

The pensions in England used to be given to aristocrats who had political power, in order to corrupt them. Here

the friends of humanity once more appear, in their zeal to help somebody, to be trampling on those who are trying to help themselves.

If the society does not keep up its power, if it lowers its organization or wastes its capital, it falls back toward the natural state of barbarism from which it rose, and in so doing it must sacrifice thousands of its weakest members. Hence

The social doctors enjoy the satisfaction of feeling themselves to be more moral or more enlightened than their fellow-men. They

An examination of the work of the social doctors, however, shows that they are only more ignorant and more presumptuous than other people. We

But we have inherited a vast number of social ills which never came from Nature. They are the complicated products of all the tinkering, muddling, and blundering of social doctors in the past. These products of social quackery are now buttressed by habit, fashion, prejudice, platitudinarian thinking, and new quackery in political economy and social science. It

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 a new State, finds a profit in the increasing value of land as the new State grows up. It would be unjust to take that profit away from him, or

The laborer likewise gains by carrying on his labor in a strong, highly civilized, and well-governed State far more than he could gain with equal industry on the frontier or in the midst of anarchy. He

are those who have neglected their duties, and consequently have failed to get their rights. The

distribution of rewards and punishments between those who have done their duty and those who have not.

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

A society based on contract, therefore, gives the utmost room and chance for individual development, and for all the self-reliance and dignity of a free man. That

Jobbery is the vice of plutocracy, and

The penalty of ceasing an aggressive behavior toward the hardships of life on the part of mankind is, that we go backward. We

The truth is, however, that science, as yet, has won less control of social phenomena than of any other class of phenomena. The most complex and difficult subject which we now have to study is the constitution of human society, the forces which operate in it, and the laws by which they act, and we know less about these things than about any others which demand our attention. In

The criminal law needs to be improved to meet new forms of crime, but to denounce financial devices which are useful and legitimate because use is made of them for fraud, is ridiculous and unworthy of the age in which we live.

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.

Labor organizations are formed, not to employ combined effort for a common object, but to indulge in declamation and denunciation, and especially to furnish an easy living to some officers who do not want to work.

The millionaires are a product of natural selection ... the naturally selected agents of society for certain work. They get high wages and live in luxury, but the bargain is a good one for society.

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