Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Greatest
Social
Slate
Men
Pencil
World
Pencils
Folly
Plan
Capable
Plans

More quotes by William Graham Sumner

Image
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
Image
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
Image
What we prepare for is what we shall get
William Graham Sumner
Image
History is only a tiresome repetition of one story. Persons and classes have sought to win possession of the power of the State in order to live luxuriously out of the earnings of others
William Graham Sumner
Image
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.
William Graham Sumner
Image
The aggregation of large fortunes is not at all a thing to be regretted.
William Graham Sumner
Image
The State cannot get a cent for any man without taking it from some other man, and this latter must be a man who has produced and saved it. This latter is the Forgotten Man
William Graham Sumner
Image
Hunger, love, vanity, and fear. There are four great motives of human action.
William Graham Sumner
Image
But we have inherited a vast number of social ills which never came from Nature. They are the complicated products of all the tinkering, muddling, and blundering of social doctors in the past.
William Graham Sumner
Image
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
Image
If you want war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men ever are subject.
William Graham Sumner
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The truth is that cupidity, selfishness, envy, malice, lust, vindictiveness, are constant vices of human nature.
William Graham Sumner
Image
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
Image
It is remarkable that jealousy of individual property in land often goes along with very exaggerated doctrines of tribal or national property in land.
William Graham Sumner
Image
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
Image
There is no such thing on this earth as something for nothing.
William Graham Sumner
Image
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
Image
The forgotten man... He works, he votes, generally he prays, but his chief business in life is to pay.
William Graham Sumner