06/29/2025

Every civilized society has to carry below the sections of the masses a dead weight of ignorance, poverty, crime, and disease. Every such society has, in the great, central section of the masses, a great body which . . . lives by routine and tradition. It is not brutal, but it is shallow, narrow-minded, and prejudiced. . . . It can sometimes be moved by appeals to its fixed-ideas and prejudices. It is affected in its mores from the classes above it.

— William Graham Sumner, Folkways