Quotes About Property

One ideological claim is that private property is theft, that the natural product of the existence of property is evil, and that private ownership therefore should not exist... What those who feel this way don't realize is that property is a notion that has to do with control - that property is a system for the disposal of power. The absence of property almost always means the concentration of power in the state.

In the latter sense, a man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them. He has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them. He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them. In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.

In virtually every Continental state at this time, aristocracies had to live with the risk that their property might be pillaged or confiscated. Only in Great Britain did it prove possible to float the idea that aristocratic property was in some magical and strictly intangible way the people's property also. The fact that hundreds of thousands of men and women today are willing to accept that privately owned country houses and their contents are part of Britain's national heritage is one more proof of how successfully the British elite reconstructed its cultural image in an age of revolution.

We're taking on Social Security as a property rights issue. We figure that every single American has an absolute property right interest in the fruits of his or her own labor. What I work for should be my property.

The earth, in its natural, uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race." As the land gets cultivated, "it is the value of the improvement, only, and not the earth itself, that is in individual property. Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated lands, owes to the community a ground-rent..to every person, rich or poor...because it is in lieu of the natural inheritance, which, as a right, belongs to every man, over and above the property he may have created, or inherited from those who did

Conscience is the most sacred of all property; other property depending in part on positive law, the exercise of that being a natural and unalienable right. To guard a man's house as his castle, to pay public and enforce private debts with the most exact faith, can give no title to invade a man's conscience, which is more sacred than his castle, or to withhold from it that debt of protection for which the public faith is pledged by the very nature and original conditions of the social pact.

Our freedom must be had at all hazards. If the men of property will not help us they must fall; we will free ourselves by the aid of that large and respectable class of the community - the men of no property.

Every tax, however, is to the person who pays it a badge, not of slavery but of liberty. It denotes that he is a subject to government, indeed, but that, as he has some property, he cannot himself be the property of a master.

Wealth brings with it its own checks and balances. The basis of political economy is noninterference. The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and supply. Open the doors of opportunity to talent and virtue and they will do themselves justice, and property will not be in bad hands. In a free and just commonwealth, property rushes from the idle and imbecile to the industrious, brave and persevering.

I have no problem with anybody who wants to bear public witness to their religion, but I don't think they can do it on public property. They have to do it on private property. There's nothing unconstitutional about that.

It is Mind which determines the change of Society, and it was because the mind at work was a Catholic mind that the slave became a serf and was on his way to becoming a peasant and a fully free man-a man free economically as well as politically. The whole spirit of the Church was for small property, and that spirit was slowly, instinctively, working for the establishment of small property throughout Christendom.

For a man's property is not at all secure, though there be good and equitable laws to set the bounds of it, between him and his fellow subjects, if he who commands those subjects, have power to take from any private man, what part he pleases of his property, and use and dispose of it as he thinks good.

Whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.

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.

I understood when I was just a child that without water, everything dies. I didn't understand until much later that no one "owns" water. It might rise on your property, but it just passes through. You can use it, and abuse it, but it is not yours to own. It is part of the global commons, not "property" but part of our life support system.

There's a popular misconception that property boundaries are based on coordinates that surveyors can simply "walk to" with our instruments. The reality is that, while physical coordination of monuments is easier than it's ever been, property boundaries often need to be determined based on evidence and plans that are old, decrepit, and done with different technology and expectations than we have today.

It is remarkable that jealousy of individual property in land often goes along with very exaggerated doctrines of tribal or national property in land.

Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; second, to liberty; third, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. These are evident branches of ... the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature. All men have a right to remain in a state of nature as long as they please; and in case of intolerable oppression, civil or religious, to leave the society they belong to, and ernter into another.... Now what liberty can there be where property is taken away without consent?

I said that one of the causes, and the one that has created more excitement and dissatisfaction than any other, is, that the Government will not hereafter, and when it is necessary, interpose to protect slaves as property in the Territories; and I asked the Senator if he would abandon his squatter-sovereignty notions and agree to protect slaves as all other property?

Some people really trip on success or popularity. My friends would talk to me about that, about tripping on all this stuff, but you know what I tripped on? I started buying property.

I don't want to write an autobiography because I would become public property with no privacy left.

This is the very ecstasy of love, whose violent property ordoes itself and leads the will to desperate undertakings.

Private property began the instant somebody had a mind of his own.

The right to work, I had assumed, was the most precious liberty that man possesses. Man has indeed as much right to work as he has to live, to be free, to own property.

The best ideas are common property.

The true patriot scrutinizes the actions of his own government with unceasing vigilance. And when his government violates the morality and rightness associated with principles of individual freedom and private property, he immediately rises in opposition to his government.

The power confided in me will be used to hold, occupy and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts.

When capital owners are few, the private-property conduits of necessity create vast savings reservoirs for those few. If there were many owners, the same conduits would broadly irrigate the economy with purchasing power.

The earth has been cultivated before it has been divided; the cultivation itself having been the only motive for a division, and for that law which secures to every one his property. For the first persons who have employed themselves in cultivation, have probably worked as much land as their strength would permit, and, consequently, more than was necessary for their own nourishment.

We give all we have, lives, property, safety, skill...we fight, we die, for a simple thing. Only that a man can stand up.

Animals are not resources or property with whom we can do what we please, their lives matter very much, and they should be firmly entrenched in our moral community. Accepting the notion of ‘animal guardian’ to replace ‘pet owner’ will go a long way towards making the lives of our companions much better and richer.

The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves, nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.

The Internet has been a blessing and a curse. The curse we know: A lot of people appropriating your intellectual property without paying for it. But I think it's important to realize the blessing of the Internet, which is that everybody has a voice and you can break through, even without a record company.

Did I say "republic?" By God, yes, I said "republic!" Long live the glorious republic of the United States of America. Damn democracy. It is a fraudulent term used, often by ignorant persons but no less often by intellectual fakers, to describe an infamous mixture of socialism, graft, confiscation of property and denial of personal rights to individuals whose virtuous principles make them offensive.

I often say that if you want to really want to understand the contract of marriage just ask anyone who has been divorced. The marriage contract is one of property rights. Or maybe you can look in the bible to see what Adam had to say about divorce since Eve was his second wife.

In the present state of our knowledge, it would be useless to attempt to speculate on the remote cause of the electrical energy... its relation to chemical affinity is, however, sufficiently evident. May it not be identical with it, and an essential property of matter?

Private property is held sacred in all good governments, and particularly in our own. Yet shall the fear of invading it prevent a general from marching his army over a cornfield or burning a house which protects the enemy? A thousand other instances might be cited to show that laws must sometimes be silent when necessity speaks.

No man in this country is under the smallest obligation, moral or otherwise, so to arrange his legal relations to his business or his property as to enable the Inland Revenue to put the largest shovel into his stores.

Property is organized robbery.

Private property implies exclusivity, inequality, and difference.

A government that can at pleasure accuse, shoot, and hang men, as traitors, for the one general offence of refusing to surrender themselves and their property unreservedly to its arbitrary will, can practice any and all special and particular oppressions it pleases.

I decided that if nobody else was going to do anything to rectify this colossal inequity in taxation, I'd have to do it myself. So I instituted a suit against the city of Baltimore demanding that the city assessor be specifically ordered to assess the Church for its vast property holdings in the city, and that the city tax collector then be instructed to collect the taxes once the assessment has been made.

A property of an organism enters into its life (and survival) in many different ways, some more salient than others. But there is no simple notion of its being "for" some function.

Free government cannot long endure if property is largely in a few hands, and large masses of people are unable to earn homes, education, and a support in old age.

You have to ask yourself, 'Who owns me? Do I own myself or am I just another piece of government property?'

It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer's feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years.

When people who are songwriters say 'That's my property and if you give it away for free then I'll lose my incentive,' then, well, good riddance.

The power to gossip is more democratically distributed than power, property, and income, and, certainly, than the freedom to speak openly.