Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
I never have known a man of ordinary common-sense who did not urge upon his sons, from earliest childhood, doctrines of economy and the practice of accumulation.
William Graham Sumner
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Economy
Accumulation
Practice
Urge
Known
Sons
Common
Urges
Upon
Doctrine
Sense
Son
Never
Childhood
Doctrines
Men
Ordinary
Earliest
More quotes by 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
If America becomes militant, it will be because its people choose to become such it will be because they think that war and warlikeness are desirable.
William Graham Sumner
Great captains of industry are as rare as great generals
William Graham Sumner
The forgotten man... He works, he votes, generally he prays, but his chief business in life is to pay.
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
There is no device whatever to be invented for securing happiness without industry, economy, and virtue.
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 class distinctions simply result from the different degrees of success with which men have availed themselves of the chances which were presented to them. Instead of endeavoring to redistribute the acquisitions which have been made between the existing classes, our aim should be to increase, multiply, and extend the chances.
William Graham Sumner
It is the greatest folly of which a man can be capable to sit down with a slate and pencil to plan out a new social world.
William Graham Sumner
We throw all our attention on the utterly idle question whether A has done as well as B, when the only question is whether A has done as well as he could.
William Graham Sumner
Nine-tenths of our measures for preventing vice are really protective towards it, because they ward off the penalty.
William Graham Sumner
It would be hard to find a single instance of a direct assault by positive effort upon poverty, vice, and misery which has not either failed or, if it has not failed directly and entirely, has not entailed other evils greater than the one which it removed.
William Graham Sumner
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.
William Graham Sumner
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.
William Graham Sumner
The lobby is the army of the plutocracy.
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
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.
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
Men never cling to their dreams with such tenacity as at the moment when they are losing faith in them, and know it, but do not dare yet to confess it to themselves.
William Graham Sumner
It is the tendency of the social burdens to crush out the middle class, and to force society into an organization of only two classes, one at each social extreme.
William Graham Sumner
