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Hunger, love, vanity, and fear. There are four great motives of human action.
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
Fear
Action
Human
Motives
Humans
Motive
Great
Vanity
Love
Hunger
Motivation
Four
More quotes by William Graham Sumner
Darwin was as much of an emancipator as was Lincoln.
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
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
We shall find that every effort to realize equality necessitates a sacrifice of liberty.
William Graham Sumner
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
Nine-tenths of our measures for preventing vice are really protective towards it, because they ward off the penalty.
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
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
If you want war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men ever are subject.
William Graham Sumner
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
A fool is wiser in his own house than a sage is in another man's house.
William Graham Sumner
There ought to be no laws to guarantee property against the folly of its possessors.
William Graham Sumner
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.
William Graham Sumner
He who would be well taken care of must take care of himself.
William Graham Sumner
The type and formula of most schemes of philanthropy or humanitarianism is this: A and B put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to do for D. . . . I call C the Forgotten Man.
William Graham Sumner
The yearning after equality [in economic outcome] is the offspring of envy and covetousness, and there is no possible plan for satisfying that yearning which can do aught else than rob A to give to B consequently all such plans nourish some of the meanest vices of human nature, waste capital, and overthrow civilization.
William Graham Sumner
One thing must be granted to the rich: they are goodnatured.
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
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
The forgotten man... He works, he votes, generally he prays, but his chief business in life is to pay.
William Graham Sumner
