The man who gives me employment, which I must have or suffer, that man is my master, let me call him what I will.

At the beginning of this marvelous era it was natural to expect, and it was expected, that laborsaving inventions would lighten the toil and improve the condition of the laborer; that the enormous increase in the power of producing wealth would make real poverty a thing of the past... From Progress and Poverty, To those who, seeing the vice and misery that spring from the unequal distribution of wealth and privilege, feel the possibility of a higher social state and would strive for its attainment.

It is not from top to bottom that societies die; it is from bottom to top.

So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.

For every social wrong there must be a remedy. But the remedy can be nothing less than the abolition of the wrong.

There are people into whose heads it never enters to conceive of any better state of society than that which now exists.

Man is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; the only animal that is never satisfied.