Top 60 William Graham Sumner Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Hunger, love, vanity, and fear. There are four great motives of human action.”

— William Graham Sumner

2. “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.”

— William Graham Sumner

3. “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

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

— William Graham Sumner

5. “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

6. “What we prepare for is what we shall get.”

— William Graham Sumner

7. “There is no such thing on this earth as something for nothing.”

— William Graham Sumner

8. “The truth is that cupidity, selfishness, envy, malice, lust, vindictiveness, are constant vices of human nature.”

— William Graham Sumner

9. “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

10. “There is no boon in nature. All the blessings we enjoy are the fruits of labor, toil, self-denial, and study.”

— William Graham Sumner

11. “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

12. “A fool is wiser in his own house than a sage is in another man’s house.”

— William Graham Sumner

13. “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

14. “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

15. “The Forgotten Man is delving away in patient industry, supporting his family, paying his taxes, casting his vote, supporting the church and the school, reading his newspaper, and cheering for the politician of his admiration, but he is the only one for whom there is no provision in the great scramble and the big divide.”

— William Graham Sumner

16. “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

17. “Great captains of industry are as rare as great generals.”

— William Graham Sumner

18. “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

19. “The aggregation of large fortunes is not at all a thing to be regretted.”

— William Graham Sumner

20. “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

21. “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

22. “Civil liberty is the status of the man who is guaranteed by law and civil institutions the exclusive employment of all his own powers for his own welfare.”

— William Graham Sumner

23. “There is no device whatever to be invented for securing happiness without industry, economy, and virtue.”

— William Graham Sumner

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “If you want war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men ever are subject...”

— William Graham Sumner

28. “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

29. “He who would be well taken care of must take care of himself.”

— William Graham Sumner

30. “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

31. “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

32. “One thing must be granted to the rich: they are goodnatured.”

— William Graham Sumner

33. “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

34. “The lobby is the army of the plutocracy.”

— William Graham Sumner

35. “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

36. “Darwin was as much of an emancipator as was Lincoln.”

— William Graham Sumner

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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

41. “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

42. “What man ever blamed himself for his misfortune?”

— William Graham Sumner

43. “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

44. “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

45. “The great force for forging a society into a solid mass has always been war.”

— William Graham Sumner

46. “The invectives against capital in the hands of those who have it are double-faced, and when turned about are nothing but demands for capital in the hands of those who have it not, in order that they may do with it just what those who have it now are doing with it.”

— William Graham Sumner

47. “It is often said that the earth belongs to the race, as if raw land was a boon, or gift.”

— William Graham Sumner

48. “History is only a tiresome repetition of one story.”

— William Graham Sumner

49. “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

50. “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.”

— William Graham Sumner