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

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

Whatever capital you divert to the support of a shiftless and good-for-nothing person is so much diverted from some other employment, and that means from somebody else. I would spend any conceivable amount of zeal and eloquence if I possessed it to try to make people grasp this idea. Capital is force. If it goes one way it cannot go another. If you give a loaf to a pauper you cannot give the same loaf to a laborer. Now this other man who would have got it but for the charitable sentiment which bestowed it on a worthless member of society is the Forgotten Man.

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

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

Men educated in [the critical habit of thought]are slow to believe. They can hold things as possible or probable in all degrees, without certainty and without pain.

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.