Quotes About Sumner

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

there are yet mixed in our institutions mediaeval theories of protection, regulation, and authority, and

Despite Sumner's vigorous opposition, the Senate, after an all-night debate, adopted a resolution introduced by Senator Oliver P. Morton of Indiana authorizing the commission, and the House followed suit.51

Most tellingly, it was a time when the ideas of William Graham Sumner, a professor of political and social science at Yale, dominated American social thought. Sumner brought Charles Darwin's thinking to America and twisted it into a theory to fit the times. Few Americans living today have read any of Sumner's writings, but they had an electrifying effect on America during the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

Listen to today's Republicans and you hear a continuous regurgitation of Sumner. "Civilization has a simple choice," Sumner wrote in the 1880s. It's either "liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest" or "not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members." Sound familiar?

I'm English, and my favorite movie is 'Manhattan.'

Going seventy miles an hour but not going anywhere—not enough imagination to want to go anywhere! Getting their music by turning a dial. Getting their phrases from the comic strips instead of from Shakespeare and the Bible and Veblen and Old Bill Sumner. Pap-fed flabs!

I realize," said Sumner, "that the press is hardly reliable." Lincoln turned from the window; suddenly, he grinned. "Oh, yes, they are. They lie. And then they re-lie. So they are nothing if not re-lie-able.

There is every indication that we are to see new developments of the power of aggregated capital to serve civilization, and that the new developments will be made right here in America.

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

Does not the New Testament exhort us to extend a hand to one who has fallen? Professor Sumner would have us place a foot on the fallen one as he lies prone and pitiable, the better to remain his superior.

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

the press hailed him as "the Genius of Freedom," on a par with Sumner and Lincoln himself.