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I have lived through the best years of this country's history. The next generations are going to see war and social calamities. I am glad I don't have to live on into them.

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
Next
Calamities
Best
Calamity
Live
Glad
Country
Lived
Going
Generations
Years
War
History
Social

More quotes by William Graham Sumner

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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
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It used to be believed that the parent had unlimited claims on the child and rights over him. In a truer view of the matter, we are coming to see that the rights are on the side of the child and the duties on the side of the parent.
William Graham Sumner
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It is often said that the earth belongs to the race, as if raw land was a boon, or gift.
William Graham Sumner
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The taxing power is especially something after which the reformer's finger always itches.
William Graham Sumner
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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
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A fool is wiser in his own house than a sage is in another man's house.
William Graham Sumner
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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
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The great hindrance to the development of this continent has lain in the lack of capital.
William Graham Sumner
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Hunger, love, vanity, and fear. There are four great motives of human action.
William Graham Sumner
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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
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The forgotten man... He works, he votes, generally he prays, but his chief business in life is to pay.
William Graham Sumner
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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.
William Graham Sumner
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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.
William Graham Sumner
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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.
William Graham Sumner
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Great captains of industry are as rare as great generals
William Graham Sumner
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History is only a tiresome repetition of one story.
William Graham Sumner
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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
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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
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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.
William Graham Sumner
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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.
William Graham Sumner