Quotes on property
Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
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Frederic Bastiat Quotes
An argument fatal to the communist theory, is suggested by the fact, that a desire for property is one of the elements of our nature.
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Herbert Spencer Quotes
The preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks is of more importance to the public than all the property of all the rich men in the country.
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John Adams Quotes
It is the lash of hunger which compels the poor man to submit. In order to live he must sell - "voluntarily" sell - himself every day and hour to the "beast of property."
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Johann Most Quotes
Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.
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Walter Lippmann Quotes
Men would live exceedingly quiet if these two words, mine and thine were taken away.
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Anaxagoras Quotes
Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.
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John Locke Quotes
Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct, represent the stronghold of man's enslavement and all the horrors it entails.
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Emma Goldman Quotes
By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.
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Henry David Thoreau Quotes
If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.
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Ludwig von Mises Quotes
Upon the sacredness of property civilization itself depends - the right of the laborer to his hundred dollars in the savings bank, and equally the legal right of the millionaire to his millions.
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Andrew Carnegie Quotes
The earth is the general and equal possession of all humanity and therefore cannot be the property of individuals.
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Leo Tolstoy Quotes
As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
So long as the great majority of men are not deprived of either property or honor, they are satisfied.
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Niccolo Machiavelli Quotes
Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.
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Henry David Thoreau Quotes
So great moreover is the regard of the law for private property, that it will not authorize the least violation of it; no, not even for the general good of the whole community.
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William Blackstone Quotes
Some people talk of morality, and some of religion, but give me a little snug property.
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Maria Edgeworth Quotes
No man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic also.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Whenever there is a conflict between human rights and property rights, human rights must prevail.
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Abraham Lincoln Quotes
Don't you know that if people could bottle the air they would? Don't you know that there would be an American Air-bottling Association? And don't you know that they would allow thousands and millions to die for want of breath, if they could not pay for air? I am not blaming anybody. I am just telling how it is.
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Robert Green Ingersoll Quotes
It is preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly.
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Bertrand Russell Quotes
The dichotomy between personal liberties and property rights is a false one. Property does not have rights. People have rights.
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Potter Stewart Quotes
I am what is mine. Personality is the original personal property.
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Norman Brown Quotes
The love of property and consciousness of right and wrong have conflicting places in our organization, which often makes a man's course seem crooked, his conduct a riddle.
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Abraham Lincoln Quotes
Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.
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Aristotle Quotes
Property, n. Any material thing, having no particular value, that may be held by A against the cupidity of B. Whatever gratifies the passion for possession in one and disappoints it in all others. The object of man's brief rapacity and long indifference.
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Ambrose Bierce Quotes
As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.
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James Madison Quotes
What we call real estate - the solid ground to build a house on - is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests.
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Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes
The recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain, not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing is to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
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Gilbert Keith Chesterton Quotes
The right to private property meant at the same time the right and duty to be personally concerned about your own well-being, to be personally concerned about your family's income, to be personally concerned about your future. This is hard work.
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Mikhail Khodorkovsky Quotes
Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.
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Martin Luther King Quotes
I told my mother-in-law that my house was her house, and she said, "Get the hell off my property."
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Joan Rivers Quotes
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not anyone have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes