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William Graham Sumner QUOTES

William Graham Sumner QUOTES

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

― William Graham Sumner , What Social Classes Owe to Each Other

2 " Liberty is an affair of laws and institutions which bring rights and duties into equilibrium. It is not at all an affair of selecting the proper class to rule. "

― William Graham Sumner , What Social Classes Owe to Each Other

3 " The lobby is the army of the plutocracy. "

― William Graham Sumner , What Social Classes Owe to Each Other

4 " History is only a tiresome repetition of one story. "

― William Graham Sumner , What Social Classes Owe to Each Other

5 " The critical habit of thought, if usual in society, will pervade all its mores, because it is a way of taking up the problems of life. Men educated in it cannot be stampeded by stump orators ... They are slow to believe. They can hold things as possible or probable in all degrees, without certainty and without pain. They can wait for evidence and weigh evidence, uninfluenced by the emphasis or confidence with which assertions are made on one side or the other. They can resist appeals to their dearest prejudices and all kinds of cajolery. Education in the critical faculty is the only education of which it can be truly said that it makes good citizens. "

― William Graham Sumner

6 " All history is only one long story to this effect: men have struggled for power over their fellow-men in order that they might win the joys of earth at the expense of others and might shift the burdens of life from their own shoulders upon those of others. "

― William Graham Sumner , The Forgotten Man

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

― William Graham Sumner , The Forgotten Man

8 " The advantage of some is won by an equivalent loss of others. "

― William Graham Sumner , The Forgotten Man

9 " Such is the Forgotten Man. He works, he votes, generally he prays—but he always pays—yes, above all, he pays. "

― William Graham Sumner , The Forgotten Man

10 " What man ever blamed himself for his misfortune? "

― William Graham Sumner , The Forgotten Man

11 " Can anyone imagine that the masterfulness, the overbearing disposition, the greed of gain, and the ruthlessness in methods, which are the faults of the master of industry at his worst, would cease when he was a functionary of the State, which had relieved him of risk and endowed him with authority? Can anyone imagine that politicians would no longer be corruptly fond of money, intriguing, and crafty when they were charged, not only with patronage and government contracts, but also with factories, stores, ships, and railroads? Could we expect anything except that, when the politician and the master of industry were joined in one, we should have the vices of both unchecked by the restraints of either? "

― William Graham Sumner ,

12 " As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X or, in the better case, what A, B and C shall do for X… What I want to do is to look up C… I call him the Forgotten Man… He is the man who never is thought of. He is the victim of the reformer, social speculator and philanthropist, and I hope to show you before I get through that he deserves your notice both for his character and for the many burdens which are laid upon him. "

― William Graham Sumner , The Forgotten Man

13 " 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. "

― William Graham Sumner , The Forgotten Man

14 " It must put down schemes for making "the rich" pay for whatever "the poor" want, just as it tramples on the old theories that only the rich are fit to regulate society. One "

― William Graham Sumner , What Social Classes Owe to Each Other

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

― William Graham Sumner , The Forgotten Man

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

― William Graham Sumner , What Social Classes Owe to Each Other

17 " 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 "

― William Graham Sumner , What Social Classes Owe to Each Other

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

― William Graham Sumner , What Social Classes Owe to Each Other

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

― William Graham Sumner , What Social Classes Owe to Each Other

20 " 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 "

― William Graham Sumner , What Social Classes Owe to Each Other