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"Undoubtedly there are, in connection with each of these things, cases of fraud, swindling, and other financial crimes; that is to say, the greed and selfishness of men are perpetual."
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"When a man is wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package."
"The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius."
"What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts."
"A sudden bold and unexpected question doth many times surprise a man and lay him open."
Explore more quotes by William Graham Sumner
"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."
"Joint-stock companies are yet in their infancy, and incorporated capital, instead of being a thing which can be overturned, is a thing which is becoming more and more indispensable."
"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."
"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."
"The men who start out with the notion that the world owes them a living generally find that the world pays its debt in the penitentiary or the poor house."
"Men of routine or men who can do what they are told are not hard to find; but men who can think and plan and tell the routine men what to do are very rare."
"Any one who believes that any great enterprise of an industrial character can be started without labor must have little experience of life."
"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."
"The criminal law needs to be improved to meet new forms of crime, but to denounce financial devices which are useful and legitimate because use is made of them for fraud, is ridiculous and unworthy of the age in which we live."
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