Gentlemen, the time is coming when there will be two great classes, So — William Graham Sumner

"728. Moral anarchy. The antagonism between a virtue policy and a success policy is a constant ethical problem. The Renaissance in Italy shows that although moral traditions may be narrow and mistaken, any morality is better than moral anarchy. Moral traditions are guides which no one can afford to neglect. They are in the mores and they are lost in every great revolution of the mores. Then the men are morally lost. Their notions, desires, purposes, and means become false, and even the notion of crime is arbitrary and untrue. If all try the policy of dishonesty, the result will be the firmest conviction that honesty is the best policy. The mores aim always to arrive at correct notions of virtue. In so far as they reach correct results the virtue policy proves to be the only success policy."

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

"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."

"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."

"What we prepare for is what we shall get."

"About half a century before the Depression, a Yale philosopher named William Graham Sumner penned a lecture against the progressives of his own day and in defense of classical liberalism. The lecture eventually become an essay, titled "The Forgotten Man". Applying his own elegant algebra of politics, Sumner warned that well-intentioned social progressives often coerced unwitting average citizens into funding dubious social projects."