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"I have before me a newspaper slip on which a writer expresses the opinion that no one should be allowed to possess more than one million dollars' worth of property."
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"He never chooses an opinion; he just wears whatever happens to be in style."

"Just because they disagree, doesn't mean you ain't right."

"As long one is not able to let go of the insistence on a certain opinion [faith, sect], he has not earned the right for Moksha [Ultimate Liberation]. He is not worthy of Moksha if he is in the sect. He is only worthy of material happiness; he is worthy of a celestial life."

"One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed."

"Public opinion is to an unconventional idea - what abortion is to sperm."

"Much like humans, opinions come in all shapes and forms, but in the end, they are just what they are; and may yet still be categorized in nature. The first you might say is the Indoctrinal, which is, of course, dictated by community and necessity, by the human need for acceptance; secondly, there is the Personal, and this is often dictated by individuality, by the yearning to seem interesting and intelligent, or free, or special; and lastly comes the Emotional. This is most commonly dictated by circumstance and bitterness and excitement. However, rarely do we find the case in which any of these are dictated by reason in the pure state: it is by this we see that at the core of a number of false opinions lies not always misinformation but quite often some issue of the human self."

"The easiest way to get a reputation is to go outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a violent atheist or a dangerous radical, and then crawl back to the shelter."

"I get depressed with these fluffy dragons and noble elves. Elves were never noble. They were cruel bastards. And I dislike heroes. You can't trust the buggers. They always let you down. I don't believe in the natural nobility of kings, because a large percentage of them in our history have turned out to be power-crazed idiots. And I certainly don't believe in the wisdom of wizards. I've worked with their modern equivalents, and I know what I'm talking about."
Explore more quotes by William Graham Sumner


"It is a beneficent incident of the ownership of land that a pioneer who reduces it to use, and helps to lay the foundations of a new State, finds a profit in the increasing value of land as the new State grows up."


"We are to see the development of the country pushed forward at an unprecedented rate by an aggregation of capital, and a systematic application of it under the direction of competent men."


"The great hinderance to the development of this continent has lain in the lack of capital."


"The waste of capital, in proportion to the total capital, in this country between 1800 and 1850, in the attempts which were made to establish means of communication and transportation, was enormous."


"We throw all our attention on the utterly idle question whether A has done as well as B, when the only question is whether A has done as well as he could."


"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."


"It 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."


"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."


"Men never cling to their dreams with such tenacity as at the moment when they are losing faith in them, and know it, but do not dare yet to confess it to themselves."
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