If you allow a political catchword to go on and grow, you will awaken some day to find it standing over you, arbiter of your destiny, against which you are powerless.
William Graham SumnerIt 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 SumnerIt 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 SumnerI never have known a man of ordinary common-sense who did not urge upon his sons, from earliest childhood, doctrines of economy and the practice of accumulation.
William Graham SumnerMy 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.
William Graham Sumner