Quotes by William Graham Sumner

About William Graham Sumner:

William Graham Sumner was a classical liberal (now often called "libertarian") American social scientist. He taught social sciences at Yale, where he held the nation's first professorship in sociology. He was one of the most influential teachers at Yale or any major schools. Sumner was a polymath with numerous books and essays on American history, economic history, political theory, sociology, and anthropology. He introduced the term "ethnocentrism" to identify the roots of imperialism, which he strongly opposed. He was a spokesman against imperialism and in favor of the "forgotten man" of the middle class and had a long-term influence on Conservatism in the United States.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

The lobby is the army of the plutocracy.

William Graham Sumner

We shall find that every effort to realize equality necessitates a sacrifice of liberty.

William Graham Sumner

Liberty is an affair of laws and institutions which bring rights and duties into equilibrium. It is not at all an affair of selecting the proper class to rule.

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

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.

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

The forgotten man... He works, he votes, generally he prays, but his chief business in life is to pay.

William Graham Sumner

The waste of capital, in proportion to the total capital, in this country between 1800 and 1850, in the attempts which were made to establish means of communication and transportation, was enormous.

William Graham Sumner

Men never cling to their dreams with such tenacity as at the moment when they are losing faith in them, and know it, but do not dare yet to confess it to themselves.

William Graham Sumner

Moreover, there is an unearned increment on capital and on labor, due to the presence, around the capitalist and the laborer, of a great, industrious, and prosperous society.

William Graham Sumner

Then, again, the ability to organize and conduct industrial, commercial, or financial enterprises is rare; the great captains of industry are as rare as great generals.

William Graham Sumner

The great hinderance to the development of this continent has lain in the lack of capital.

William Graham Sumner

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

There is every indication that we are to see new developments of the power of aggregated capital to serve civilization, and that the new developments will be made right here in America.

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

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

Men of routine or men who can do what they are told are not hard to find; but men who can think and plan and tell the routine men what to do are very rare.

William Graham Sumner

We are to see the development of the country pushed forward at an unprecedented rate by an aggregation of capital, and a systematic application of it under the direction of competent men.

William Graham Sumner

The men who start out with the notion that the world owes them a living generally find that the world pays its debt in the penitentiary or the poor house.

William Graham Sumner

Author Bio

  • NameWilliam Graham Sumner
  • DescriptionAmerican academic
  • BornOctober 30, 1840
  • DiedApril 12, 1910
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionAnthropologist; Political Scientist; Historian; Sociologist