William Graham Sumner Quotes

There is nothing government can give you that it hasn't taken from you in the first place.

Wherever democracy has prevailed, the power of the State has been used in some form or other to plunder the well-to-do classes for the benefit of the poor.

The Democrats believe they need more of your money to spend because they can spend it better than you can. But you know, sometimes philosophers don't act.

There is a difference between Senator Obama and Senator McCain. Senator Obama believes that the government ought to be able to take as much as it thinks it needs from anybody.

Taxation is nothing but organized robbery, and there the subject should be dropped.

Conservatives and liberals are kindred spirits as far as government spending is concerned. First, let's make sure we understand what government spending is. Since government has no resources of its own, and since there's no Tooth Fairy handing Congress the funds for the programs it enacts, we are forced to recognize that government spending is no less than the confiscation of one person's property to give it to another to whom it does not belong - in effect, legalized theft.

Big government doesn't help the middle class, it buries it.

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

Any government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.

Bribing rich people to help poor people, rather than helping poor people directly, is a popular approach because the cost of tax breaks doesn't show up on the government books.

Barack Obama's enemies are the people who make this country work. Barack Obama's enemies are those who succeed. Those are the people whose income he wants to redistribute. Those are the people whose income he wants to take, using the power and the force of the federal government to do it.

Politics is involved when you don't tackle inefficiency and burden people with higher tariffs.

A government which requires of the people the contribution of the bulk of their substance and rewards cannot be classed as a free government.

Government has no wealth of its own. Before it gives anything to anyone, it must take from those who produced it.

Just what part does the State play in production to warrant its rake-off? The State does not give; it merely takes.

Let us never forget this fundamental truth: The State has no source of money other than the money people themselves earn.

The state, it cannot too often be repeated, does nothing, and can give nothing, which it does not take from somebody.

Government can't deliver a free lunch to the country as a whole. It can, however, determine who pays for lunch. And last week the Senate handed the bill to the wrong party... the poor and middle class.

Are you entitled to the fruits of your own labor or does government have some presumptive right to spend and spend and spend?

The State cannot get a cent for any man without taking it from some other man, and this latter must be a man who has produced and saved it. This latter is the Forgotten Man

The theory of government I was taught says that government provides benefits, primarily security, to the entire population. In return we pay taxes. But lately the government has been a distributor of special privileges, taking money from some and giving it to others. America is now about evenly split between those who pay income taxes and those who consume them.

The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly, and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.

In the United States, the day when you pay your taxes is a day of mourning because this alien force - the government - is coming to rob you of your hard-earned money. That's the general attitude, and it's a tremendous victory for the opponents of democracy, and, of course, any privileged sector is going to hate democracy. You can see it in the healthcare debate.

Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes.

Democrats have always wanted to grow government with revenues from our society's producers. They aren't sincere about reducing the deficit, because they will not abandon their addiction to spending other people's money.