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

William Graham Sumner

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William Graham Sumner
Age: 69 †
Born: 1840
Born: October 30
Died: 1910
Died: April 12
Anthropologist
Historian
Philosopher
Political Scientist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Paterson
New Jersey
William Graham
William Grayham
Subject
Subjects
Peace
Frightful
War
Nourish
Ever
Doctrines
Men
Antiwar
Tyrants
Doctrine

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The aggregation of large fortunes is not at all a thing to be regretted.
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If you allow a political catchword to go on and grow, you will awaken some day to find it standing over you, arbiter of your destiny, against which you are powerless.
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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.
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There ought to be no laws to guarantee property against the folly of its possessors.
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Nine-tenths of our measures for preventing vice are really protective towards it, because they ward off the penalty.
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The taxing power is especially something after which the reformer's finger always itches.
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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.
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The invectives against capital in the hands of those who have it are double-faced, and when turned about are nothing but demands for capital in the hands of those who have it not, in order that they may do with it just what those who have it now are doing with it.
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The truth is that cupidity, selfishness, envy, malice, lust, vindictiveness, are constant vices of human nature.
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The State cannot get a cent for any man without taking it from some other man, and this latter must be a man who has produced and saved it. This latter is the Forgotten Man
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A wiser rule would be to make up your mind soberly what you want, peace or war, and then to get ready for what you want for what we prepare for is what we shall get.
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History is only a tiresome repetition of one story.
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The great hindrance to the development of this continent has lain in the lack of capital.
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If any student of social science comes to appreciate the case of the Forgotten Man, he will become an unflinching advocate of strict scientific thinking in sociology, and a hard-hearted skeptic as regards any scheme of social amelioration. He will always want to know, Who and where is the Forgotten Man in this case, who will have to pay for it all?
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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.
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There is no device whatever to be invented for securing happiness without industry, economy, and virtue.
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What man ever blamed himself for his misfortune?
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Any one who believes that any great enterprise of an industrial character can be started without labor must have little experience of life.
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It is not the function of the State to make men happy. They must make themselves happy in their own way, and at their own risk. The functions of the State lie entirely in the conditions or chances under which the pursuit of happiness is carried on.
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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.
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