Henry George Quotes

Unless there be correct thought, there cannot be any action, and when there is correct thought, right action will follow.

As it is with an individual, so it is with a nation. One must produce to have, or one will become a have-not.

Blockading squadrons are a means whereby nations seek to prevent their enemies from trading; protective tariffs are a means whereby nations attempt to prevent their own people from trading. What protectionism teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.

No person, I think, ever saw a herd of buffalo, of which a few were fat and the great majority lean. No person ever saw a flock of birds, of which two or three were swimming in grease, and the others all skin and bone.

A good, very good, not to say admirable schoolmaster, but then he is only a schoolmaster.

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.

Trade has ever been the extinguisher of war, the eradicator of prejudice, the diffuser of knowledge.

Capital is a result of labor, and is used by labor to assist it in further production. Labor is the active and initial force, and labor is therefore the employer of capital.

What protectionism teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.

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.

How many men are there who fairly earn a million dollars?

Let no man imagine that he has no influence.

That alone is wise which is just; that alone is enduring which is right.

The value of a thing is the amount of laboring or work that its possession will save the possessor.

If you would have the slave show the virtues of the freeman, you must first make him free.

I do not think that any sorrow of youth or manhood equalled in intensity or duration the black and hopeless misery which followed the wrench of transference from a happy home to a school.

Man must be doing something, or fancy that he is doing something, for in him throbs the creative impulse; the mere basker in the sunshine is not a natural, but an abnormal man.

He who sees the truth, let him proclaim it, without asking who is for it or who is against it.