Popular quotes about Property! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 6
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.
Linda ColleyIn the nature of things, those who have no property and see their neighbors possess much more than they think them to need, cannot be favorable to laws made for the protection of property. When this class becomes numerous, it becomes clamorous. It looks on property as its prey and plunder, and is naturally ready, at times, for violence and revolution.
Daniel WebsterThe English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
Derek WalcottTools may be animate as well as inanimate; for instance, a ship's captain uses a lifeless rudder, but a living man for watch; for a servant is, from the point of view of his craft, categorized as one of its tools. So any piece of property can be regarded as a tool enabling a man to live, and his property is an assemblage of such tools; a slave is a sort of living piece of property; and like any other servant is a tool in charge of other tools.
AristotleThe divorce between Church and State ought to be absolute. It ought to be so absolute that no Church property anywhere, in any state or in the nation, should be exempt from equal taxation; for if you exempt the property of any church organization, to that extent you impose a tax upon the whole community.
James A. GarfieldEvery 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.
Adam SmithFor 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.
John LockeIf we buy into the notion that somehow property rights are less important, or are in conflict with, human or civil rights, we give the socialists a freer hand to attack our property.
Walter E. WilliamsI have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot inquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premisses on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness.
Sigmund FreudThe property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable.
Adam SmithThe right of individual property is no doubt the very corner-stone of civilization, as hitherto understood; but I am a little impatient of being told that property is entitled to exceptional consideration because it bears all the burdens of the state. It bears those, indeed, which can be most easily borne, but poverty pays with its person the chief expenses of war, pestilence, and famine.
James Russell LowellIf men are discharged of reverence for ancient usage, they will treat this world, almost certainly, as if it were their private property, to be consumed for their sensual gratification; and thus they will destroy in their lust for enjoyment the property of future generations, of their own contemporaries, and indeed their very own capital.
Russell KirkI'd make an educated guess that 20 to 25 percent of the taxable property in the U.S. is Church-owned.In a recent book, Church Wealth and Business Income, it was estimated that this property -all of it tax-exempt -is worth upwards of 80 billion dollars. I know that's a fantastic, unbelievable figure, but there's every reason to believe that it's on the conservative side; and this amount is increasing yearly at a geometric rate.
Madalyn Murray O'HairIt's very important to remember that it's your intellectual property; it's not your computer. And in the pursuit of protection of intellectual property, it's important not to defeat or undermine the security measures that people need to adopt in these days.
Stewart BakerCapitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.
Ayn RandProperty does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property.
Frederic BastiatThe true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of manโs making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being. There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done.
Theodore RooseveltPollution and overuse of resources stem directly from the failure of government to defend private property. If property rights were to be defended adequately, we would find that here, as in other areas of our economy and society, private enterprise and modern technology would come not as a curse to mankind but as its salvation.
Murray RothbardI like getting involved with the people and finding out exactly what is happening. Does it have to do with the property, the home, the individuals, or a combination of everything? To me, that's always been my main goal, to find some information, to bring some type of resolution to help the people out with a piece of property that is having a major problem or a haunting. That's always been my passion and still is to this day when getting involved with anything, to try to find answers and help people.
John ZaffisNow property is part of a household, and the acquisition of property part of household-management; for neither life itself nor the good life is possible without a certain minimum supply of the necessities.
AristotleIf all those magnificent cathedrals with their valuable lands in Boston, Philadelphia and New York were taxed as they should be, the taxes of women who hold property would be proportionately lightened....I cannot see any good reason why wealthy churches and a certain amount of property of the clergy should be exempt from taxation, while every poor widow in the land, struggling to feed, clothe, and educate a family of children, must be taxed on the narrow lot and humble home.
Elizabeth Cady StantonThe soldier's body becomes a stock of accessories that are not his property.
Antoine de Saint-ExuperyEvery politically controlled educational system will inculcate the doctrine of state supremacy sooner or later. . . . Once that doctrine has been accepted, it becomes an almost superhuman task to break the stranglehold of the political power over the life of the citizen. It has had his body, property and mind in its clutches from infancy. An octopus would sooner release its prey. A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.
Isabel PatersonA democracy flirts with the danger of becoming a slave in direct ratio to the numbers of its citizens who work, but do not own / or who own, but do not work; or who distribute, as politicians do, but do not produce. The danger of the "slave state" disappears in ratio to the numbers of people who own property and admit its attendant responsibilities under God. They can call their souls their own because they own and administer something other than their souls. Thus they are free.
Fulton J. SheenThe financial history of the Baltimore and Ohio since the close of the nineteenth century is interesting chiefly in connection with changes in the control of the property
John MoodyThere is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very close chemical relation between coal and diamonds. It is the reason, I believe, why some people allude to coal as "black diamonds." Both these commodities represent wealth; but coal is a much less portable form of property.
Joseph ConradLet's call something a rigid designator if in every possible world it designates the same object, a non-rigid or accidental designator if that is not the case. Of course we don't require that the objects exist in all possible worlds.... When we think of a property as essential to an object we usually mean that it is true of that object in any case where it would have existed. A rigid designator of a necessary existent can be called strongly rigid.
Saul KripkeThe party should stand for a constantly wider diffusion of property. That is the greatest social and economic security that can come to free men. It makes men free.
Jeffrey H ReimanThe welfare state is an enemy of private property. The excessive taxation used to support the welfare state is extremely dangerous.
Charles A. MurrayThe Convention thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.
James MadisonYou must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption 'My time is my own'. Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to him employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which h allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.
C. S. LewisThe power of the state to impose restraints and burdens upon persons and property in conservation and promotion of the public health, good order, and prosperity is a power originally and always belonging to the states, not surrendered to them by the general government, nor directly restrained by the constitution of the United States, and essentially exclusive.
Melville FullerIt is certain that despotism ruins individuals by preventing them from producing wealth much more than by depriving them of what they have already produced; it dries up the source of riches, while it usually respects acquired property. Freedom, on the contrary, produces far more goods than it destroys; and the nations which are favored by free institutions invariably find that their resources increase even more rapidly than their taxes.
Alexis de TocquevilleTrees will improve property values, take pollutants out of the air, help with water runoff.
Michael BloombergThe state governments have a full superintendence and control over the immense mass of local interests of their respective states, which connect themselves with the feelings, the affections, the municipal institutions, and the internal arrangements of the whole population. They possess, too, the immediate administration of justice in all cases, civil and criminal, which concern the property, personal rights, and peaceful pursuits of their own citizens.
Joseph StoryThe civil forfeiture law - if something so devoid of due process can be dignified as law - is an incentive for perverse behavior: Predatory government agencies get to pocket the proceeds from property they seize from Americans without even charging them with, let alone convicting them of, crimes. Criminals are treated better than this because they lose the fruits of their criminality only after being convicted.
George WillPrivate property...is the creature of society and is subject to the calls of that society even to the last farthing.
Benjamin FranklinThe supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his property, without his consent in person, or by representation.
James OtisFrom the business point of viewโnot to overstate itโintellectual property is dead; long live intellectual process. Long live service; long live performance.
Esther DysonAnd when neither their property nor honour is touched, the majority of men live content, and he has only to contend with the ambition of a few, whom he can curb with ease in many ways.
Niccolo MachiavelliSARCOPHAGUS, n. Among the Greeks a coffin which being made of a certain kind of carnivorous stone, had the peculiar property of devouring the body placed in it.
Ambrose BierceThe slave states of Western world are an outgrowth of monopolistic capitalism - an economic system which is opposed to the wide distribution of private property in many hands. Instead, monopolistic capitalism concentrates productive wealth among a few men, allowing the rest to become a vast proletariat.
Fulton J. SheenI kind of hate to be the voice of doom, but I just can't see how prices can't go down. I think people have actually forgotten that property prices can decrease. There's this feeling that they just won't fall, but, of course, that's not true.
Sarah BeenyThe open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources, the whole vast challenge of a continent waiting to be exploited, combined to produce a prevailing materialism and an American drive bent as much, if not more, on money, property, and power than was true of the Old World from which we had fled.
Barbara Tuchman