Any one who believes that any great enterprise of an industrial character can be started without labor must have little experience of life.

Sumner is often seen as a proto-libertarian. He was a polymath with numerous books and essays on American history economic history political theory sociology and anthropology. William Graham Sumner (October 30 1840 – April 12 1910) was an American academic and "held the first professorship in sociology" at Yale College.