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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
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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
Within
Happiness
Found
Real
Relation
Men
Goodness
None
Generations
Courage
More quotes by William Graham Sumner
The great force for forging a society into a solid mass has always been war.
William Graham Sumner
Furthermore, the unearned increment from land appears in the United States as a gain to the first comers, who have here laid the foundations of a new State.
William Graham Sumner
If you live in a country run by committee, be on the committee.
William Graham Sumner
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.
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 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
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
Here we are, then, once more back at the old doctrine - Laissez faire. Let us translate it into blunt English, and it will read, Mind your own business. It is nothing but the doctrine of liberty. Let every man be happy in his own way.
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
In England pensions used to be given to aristocrats, because aristocrats had political influence, in order to corrupt them. Here pensions are given to the great democratic mass, because they have political power, to corrupt them.
William Graham Sumner
Darwin was as much of an emancipator as was Lincoln.
William Graham Sumner
It is often said that the earth belongs to the race, as if raw land was a boon, or gift.
William Graham Sumner
A wiser rule would be to make up your mind soberly what you want, peace or war, and then to get ready for what you want for what we prepare for is what we shall get.
William Graham Sumner
All history is only one long story to this effect: men have struggled for power over their fellow-men in order that they might win the joys of earth at the expense of others and might shift the burdens of life from their own shoulders upon those of others.
William Graham Sumner
If you allow a political catchword to go on and grow, you will awaken some day to find it standing over you, arbiter of your destiny, against which you are powerless.
William Graham Sumner
There is no such thing on this earth as something for nothing.
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
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
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
Hunger, love, vanity, and fear. There are four great motives of human action.
William Graham Sumner