William Graham Sumner

What we prepare for is what we shall get.

You see the expansion of industrial power pushed forward by the energy, hope, and thrift of men, and you see the development arrested, diverted, crippled, and defeated by measures which are dictated by military considerations.

The history of civil liberty is made up of campaigns against abuses of taxation. Protectionism is the great modern abuse of taxation; the abuse of taxation which is adapted to a republican form of government. Protectionism is now …

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.

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.

He is the man who never is thought of. … He works, he votes, generally he prays—but he always pays.

I call him the Forgotten Man.

The man who started with the notion that the world owed him a living would once more find, as he does now, that the world pays him its debt in the state prison.

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

Any prosperity policy is a delusion and a path to ruin. There is no economic lesson which the people of the United States need to take to heart more than that. In the second place the Spanish mistakes arose, in part, from confusing the …