Property Quotes - Page 10

• The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself.

  Edmund Burke

  Wisdom, Interesting, Politics

  Edmund Burke (2014). “Revolutionary Writings: Reflections on the Revolution in France and the First Letter on a Regicide Peace”, p.52, Cambridge University Press

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• All the controversialists who have become conscious of the real issue are already saying of our ideal exactly what used to be said of the Socialists' ideal. They are saying that private property is too ideal not to be impossible. They are saying that private enterprise is too good to be true. They are saying that the idea of ordinary men owning ordinary possessions is against the laws of political economy and requires an alteration in human nature.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Real, Men, Law

  4 Copy quote

• For the mass of men the idea of artistic creation can only be expressed by an idea unpopular in present discussions - the idea of property... Property is merely the art of the democracy... One would think, to hear people talk, that the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers were on the side of property. But obviously they are the enemies of property; because they are enemies of their own limitations.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Art, Men, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  William O. Douglas

  Wisdom, Men, Liberty

  4 Copy quote

• The institution of private property... is undergoing, at this time, a strain never put on it before. Not because the corporation, in essence, is retrogressive or unrepublican, but because in fact, it is unrepublican, and for that reason retrogressive also.

  Peter S. Grosscup

  Essence, Politics, Corporations

  4 Copy quote

• The effect of the corporation, under the prevailing policy of the free, go-as-you-please method of organization and management, has been to drive the bulk of our people, other than farmers, out of property ownership; and, if allowed to go on as present, it will keep them out... The paramount problem is not how to stop the growth of property, and the building up of wealth, but how to manage it so that every species of property, like a healthy growing tree will spread its roots deeply and widely in the soil of a popular proprietorship.

  Peter S. Grosscup

  Building Up, Organization, Roots

  4 Copy quote

• The 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 free men. We want a nation of proprietors, not a state of collectivists. That is attained by creating a national wealth and income, not by destroying it. The income and estate taxes create an orderly movement to diffuse swollen fortunes more effectively than all the quacks.

  Herbert Hoover

  Wisdom, Party, Men

  Herbert Hoover (1938). “Addresses upon the American road”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A community of small farmers... land property owners, will be the only assurance that the freedom our republic offers will be guaranteed to each and every citizen.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Wisdom, Land, Community

  4 Copy quote

• I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable, but the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Wisdom, Division, Politics

  Thomas Jefferson, Jean M. Yarbrough (1963). “The Essential Jefferson”, p.154, Hackett Publishing

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The banks themselves were doing business on capitals three-fourths of which were fictitious. This fictitious capital... is now to be lost, and to fall on somebody; it must take on those who have property to meet it, and probably on the less cautious part, who, not aware of the impending catastrophe, have suffered themselves to contract, or to be in debt, and must now sacrifice their property of a value many times the amount of the debt. We have been truly sowing the wind, and are now reaping the whirlwind.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Wisdom, Fall, Sacrifice

  5 Copy quote

• Equality of economic opportunity, in the context of private property, means equality of opportunity for the millions of capital-less households of today to buy, pay for, and employ in their lives the non-human factor of production, capital.

  Louis O. Kelso

  Wisdom, Mean, Opportunity

  8 Copy quote

• Private property works like circuitry in electronics, or piping in hydraulics. It conveys wages to the owners of labor power, as well as the various forms of nonwage property income to the owners of capital. In itself, it is no more responsible for maldistribution of purchasing power than the science of bookkeeping is responsible for bankruptcy.

  Louis O. Kelso

  Wisdom, Wages, Electronics

  5 Copy quote

• The idea that full employment without property ownership will solve the world's problems is utter nonsense. The Keynesian concept that the function of capital is merely to amplify labor, not independently produce wealth is simply blindness.

  Louis O. Kelso

  Wisdom, Ideas, Amplify

  4 Copy quote

• The uneasy ghost of Marx must suffer the torments of the damned at the truth glaring from the pages of history that one does not abolish property by transferring it to the state.

  Louis O. Kelso

  Wisdom, Suffering, Doe

  6 Copy quote

• With reason, then, the common opinion of mankind, little affected by the few dissentients who have contended for the opposite view, has found in the careful study of nature, and in the laws of nature, the foundations of the division of property, and the practice of all ages has consecrated the principle of private ownership, as being pre-eminently in conformity with human nature, and as conducing in the most unmistakable manner to the peace and tranquility of human existence.

  Pope Leo XIII

  Wisdom, Views, Law

  6 Copy quote

• It is clear that the main tenet of socialism, community of goods, must be utterly rejected, since it only injures those whom it would seem meant to benefit, is directly contrary to the natural rights of mankind, and would introduce confusion and disorder into the commonweal. The first and most fundamental principle, therefore, if one would undertake to alleviate the condition of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property.

  Pope Leo XIII

  Wisdom, Rights, Confusion

  Pope Leo XIII (1990). “A Light in the Heavens: Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII”, p.148, TAN Books

  70 Copy quote

  Show source

• The most common and durable source of faction has been the various and unequal distribution of property.

  James Madison

  Wisdom, Politics, Paper

  11 Copy quote

• Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.

  James Madison

  Wisdom, Politics, Economy

  The Federalist no. 10 (1788)

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Centralize property in the hands of a few and the millions are under bondage to property - a bondage as absolute and deplorable as if their limbs were covered with manacles. Abstract all property from the hands of labor and you thereby reduce labor to dependence; and that dependence becomes as complete a servitude as the master could fix upon his slave.

  Lewis Henry Morgan

  Wisdom, Hands, Politics

  17 Copy quote

• The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim, because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending.

  Lewis Henry Morgan

  Wisdom, Rights, Government

  Lewis Henry Morgan, Leslie A. White (1959). “The Indian Journals, 1859-62”, p.12, Courier Corporation

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• The time will come when human intelligence will rise to the mastery of property.

  Lewis Henry Morgan

  Wisdom, Mastery, Politics

  20 Copy quote

• Nine-tenths of the people are at present freeholders... The time is not distant when this country will abound with mechanics and manufacturers who will receive their bread from their employers. Will such men be the secure and faithful guardians of liberty? Give the votes to people who have no property, and they will sell them to the rich who will be able to buy them.

  Gouverneur Morris

  Wisdom, Country, Men

  26 Copy quote

• Marxism was the social creed and the social cry of those classes who knew by their miseries that the creed of the liberal optimists was s snare and a delusion... Liberalism and Marxism share a common illusion of the "children of light." Neither understands property as a form of power which can be used in either its individual or its social form as an instrument of particular interest against the general interest.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Wisdom, Children, Light

  4 Copy quote

• Liberalism makes this mistake in regard to private property and Marxism makes it in regard to socialized property... The Marxist illusion is partly derived from a romantic conception of human nature... It assumes that the socialization of property will eliminate human egotism... The development of a managerial class in Russia, combing economic with political power, is an historic refutation of the Marxist theory.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Wisdom, Mistake, Russia

  7 Copy quote

• It's long been common practice among many to draw a distinction between "human rights" and "property rights," suggesting that the two are separate and unequal - with "property rights" second to "human rights."

  Richard M. Nixon

  Wisdom, Rights, Practice

  8 Copy quote