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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

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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
Age
Criminals
Denounce
Use
Useful
Hype
Form
Ridiculous
Improved
Live
Forms
Unworthy
Needs
Financial
Legitimate
Made
Meet
Fraud
Crime
Criminal
Law
Devices

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The lobby is the army of the plutocracy.
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There is no boon in nature. All the blessings we enjoy are the fruits of labor, toil, self-denial, and study.
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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 truth is that cupidity, selfishness, envy, malice, lust, vindictiveness, are constant vices of human nature.
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The great hindrance to the development of this continent has lain in the lack of capital.
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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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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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Great captains of industry are as rare as great generals
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Undoubtedly there are, in connection with each of these things, cases of fraud, swindling, and other financial crimes that is to say, the greed and selfishness of men are perpetual.
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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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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.
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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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A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and tendency of things. Nature has set upon him the process of decline and dissolution by which she removes things which have survived their usefulness.
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The taxing power is especially something after which the reformer's finger always itches.
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Hunger, love, vanity, and fear. There are four great motives of human action.
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What we prepare for is what we shall get
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If you want war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men ever are subject.
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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.
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Everywhere you go on the continent of Europe at this hour you see the conflict between militarism and industrialism. You see the expansion of industrial power pushed forward by the energy, hope, and thrift of men, and you see the development arrested, diverted, crippled, and defeated by measures which are dictated by military considerations.
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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.
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