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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.
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
Without
Believes
Must
Enterprise
Great
Labor
Believe
Started
Life
Experience
Character
Littles
Little
Industrial
More quotes by William Graham Sumner
Hunger, love, vanity, and fear. There are four great motives of human action.
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.
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Society needs first of all to be free from meddlersthat is, to be let alone.
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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.
William Graham Sumner
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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Civil liberty is the status of the man who is guaranteed by law and civil institutions the exclusive employment of all his own powers for his own welfare.
William Graham Sumner
The great hindrance to the development of this continent has lain in the lack of capital.
William Graham Sumner
We shall find that every effort to realize equality necessitates a sacrifice of liberty.
William Graham Sumner
The lobby is the army of the plutocracy.
William Graham Sumner
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.
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What we prepare for is what we shall get
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.
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It is remarkable that jealousy of individual property in land often goes along with very exaggerated doctrines of tribal or national property in land.
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If we put together all that we have learned from anthropology and ethnography about primitive men and primitive society, we perceive that the first task of life is to live. Men begin with acts, not with thoughts.
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The real danger of democracy is, that the classes which have the power under it will assume all the rights and reject all the duties-that is, that they will use the political power to plunder those-who-have.
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A fool is wiser in his own house than a sage is in another man's house.
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
The State, it cannot be too often repeated, does nothing and can give nothing which it does not take from somebody. The Forgotten Man works and votes -generally he prays-but his chief business in life is to pay.
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
If you want war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men ever are subject.
William Graham Sumner