Success Quote by William Graham Sumner

A polite sentence that smuggles in a whole worldview. By calling the aggregation of large fortunes "not at all a thing to be regretted", Sumner isn’t merely defending wealth; he’s trying to pre-empt the feeling that inequality should trigger moral unease. The phrasing is clinically restrained, almost hygienic, as if regret itself were a sentimental error. That coolness is the point: it recasts concentrated wealth from a social problem into a natural outcome, like weather.

The intent lands in the Gilded Age argument over whether industrial titans were builders of progress or architects of extraction. Sumner, a leading voice of laissez-faire and Social Darwinist thinking, treats private fortune as a public signal: proof that the system is working, that talent and discipline have been correctly rewarded. The subtext is a warning to reformers. If you regret big fortunes, you’re not just criticizing individuals; you’re questioning the legitimacy of the competitive order that produced them. And that, to Sumner, risks weakening the moral spine of capitalism itself.

What makes the line rhetorically effective is its inversion of expected ethics. Most moral frameworks treat excess as suspect; Sumner flips it into a civic non-issue. Notice what goes unsaid: how fortunes are made, who absorbs the costs, what happens when wealth becomes power. The sentence invites you to skip those questions, to treat concentration as incidental, even beneficial, and to feel sophisticated for not flinching.