"My patriotism is of the kind which is outraged by the notion that the United States never was a great nation until in a petty three months’ campaign it knocked to pieces a poor, decrepit, bankrupt old state like Spain. To hold such an opinion as that is to abandon all American standards, to put shame and scorn on all that our ancestors tried to build up here, and to go over to the standards of which Spain is a representative."[1]
(on government responses to economic recessions) "No scheme which has ever been devised by them has ever made a collapsed boom go up again"
"When the negro postmaster’s house was set on fire in the night in South Carolina, and not only he, but his wife and children, were murdered as they came out, and when, moreover, this incident passed without legal investigation or punishment, it was a bad omen for the extension of liberty, etc., to Malays and Tagals by simply setting over them the American flag."[1]
"There are two chief things with which government has to deal. They are the property of men and the honor of women."
"I think the hardest fact in human life is that two and two cannot make five; but in sociology while people will agree that two and two cannot make five, yet they think that it might somehow be possible by adjusting two and two to one another in some way or other to make two and two equal four and one-tenth." (Sumner Today, 1940 p. 82)
"Nature's remedies against vice are terrible. She removes the victims without pity. 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." -- from the essay "The Forgotten Man".[2]
"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."
"He works, he votes, generally he prays--but he always pays. . . ."
1. ^ a b c d W. G. Sumner - The Conquest of the U. S. by Spain at praxeology.net
2. ^ a b William Graham Sumner's Essay, "The Forgotten Man." at www.blupete.com | by: | William Graham Sumner
(1840-1910) American classical liberal (now a branch of "libertarianism" in political philosophy), social scientist, professor of sociology, polymath |
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