PROPERTY




Liberal friendly quotes:

"Property is organized robbery."
-- George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara, preface.

"The first man who, having fenced off a plot of land, thought of saying, 'This is mine' and found people simple enough to believe him was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors might the human race had been spared by the one who, upon pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his fellow men: 'Beware of listening to this imposter; you are lost if you forget the fruits of the earth belong to all and that the earth belongs to no one.'"
-- Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 1755

"Most libertarians ignore the fact that all rights (including property rights) are created, maintained, and constrained by force or the credible threat of forceful retaliation. The few that admit this propose to use the market to distribute rights; but most people wouldn't like to see rights distributed as unevenly as incomes."
-- Mike Huben

"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."
-- Adam Smith

"Private property… is a Creature of Society, and is subject to the Calls of that Society, whenever its Necessities shall require it, even to its last Farthing, its contributors therefore to the public Exigencies are not to be considered a Benefit on the Public, entitling the Contributors to the Distinctions of Honor and Power, but as the Return of an Obligation previously received, or as payment for a just Debt."
-- Benjamin Franklin

"While it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from Nature at all… it is considered by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no one has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land… Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society."
-- Thomas Jefferson

"…legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property… Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions or property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right."
-- Thomas Jefferson (in a letter to James Madison), 1785

Next Section: Religion
Return to Quotes Page
Return to Liberalism Resurgent