William Graham Sumner Quotes
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.
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.
If you want war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men ever are subject.
If America becomes militant, it will be because its people choose to become such; it will be because they think that war and warlikeness are desirable.
Nine-tenths of our measures for preventing vice are really protective towards it, because they ward off the penalty.
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.
Who is the Forgotten Man? He is the clean quiet virtuous domestic citizen who pays his debts and his taxes and is never heard of out of his little circle.
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.
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.
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.