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Great captains of industry are as rare as great generals
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
Generals
Captains
Organize
Rare
Industry
Great
More quotes by William Graham Sumner
If you want a war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men are ever subject, because doctrines get inside a man's reason and betray him against himself. Civilized men have done their fiercest fighting for doctrines.
William Graham Sumner
A fool is wiser in his own house than a sage is in another man's house.
William Graham Sumner
Yet we are constantly annoyed, and the legislatures are kept constantly busy, by the people who have made up their minds that it is wise and conducive to happiness to live in a certain way, and who want to compel everybody else to live in their way.
William Graham Sumner
The great hindrance to the development of this continent has lain in the lack of capital.
William Graham Sumner
The taxing power is especially something after which the reformer's finger always itches.
William Graham Sumner
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.
William Graham Sumner
The truth is that cupidity, selfishness, envy, malice, lust, vindictiveness, are constant vices of human nature.
William Graham Sumner
It used to be believed that the parent had unlimited claims on the child and rights over him. In a truer view of the matter, we are coming to see that the rights are on the side of the child and the duties on the side of the parent.
William Graham Sumner
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.
William Graham Sumner
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.
William Graham Sumner
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.
William Graham Sumner
If I want to be free from any other man's dictation, I must understand that I can have no other man under my control.
William Graham Sumner
The lobby is the army of the plutocracy.
William Graham Sumner
We live in a war of two antagonistic ethical philosophies, the ethical policy taught in the books and schools, and the success policy.
William Graham Sumner
Moreover, there is an unearned increment on capital and on labor, due to the presence, around the capitalist and the laborer, of a great, industrious, and prosperous society.
William Graham Sumner
The great force for forging a society into a solid mass has always been war.
William Graham Sumner
The aggregation of large fortunes is not at all a thing to be regretted.
William Graham Sumner
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.
William Graham Sumner
A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be...The law of survival of the fittest was not made by man, and it cannot be abrogated by man. We can only, by interfering with it, produce the survival of the unfittest.
William Graham Sumner
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.
William Graham Sumner
