… is from page 261 of the 1992 collection of some of William Graham Sumner’s best essays, On Liberty, Society, and Politics (Roger C. Bannister, ed.); specifically, this quotation is from Sumner’s insightful 1894 essay “The Absurd Effort to Make the World Over”:
[I]t is the greatest folly of which a man can be capable, to sit down with a slate and pencil to plan out a new social world.
DBx: If there is a bigger folly than the one described here by Sumner, it is to put stock – which can be nothing but blind faith – in those persons who sit down with a slate and pencil (or, today, with a keyboard and computer software) to plan out a new social world.
