Property has its duties as well as its rights.
Thomas Drummond
Property is robbery.
Latin Proverb
When your cat rubs the side of its face along your leg, it’s affectionately marking you with its scent, identifying you as its private property, saying, in effect, ‘You belong to me’.
Susan McDonough
When I consider this carefully, I find not a single property which with certainty separates the waking state from the dream. How can you be certain that your whole life is not a dream?
Rene Descartes
Property is organized robbery.
George Bernard Shaw
When people lack jobs, opportunity, and ownership of property they have little or no stake in their communities.
Jack Kemp
Property is the fruit of labor; property is desirable; it is a positive good in the world.
Abraham Lincoln
The earth is the general and equal possession of all humanity and therefore cannot be the property of individuals.
Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy
So long as the great majority of men are not deprived of either property or honor, they are satisfied.
Niccolo Machiavelli
Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.
Voltaire
The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.
John Adams
As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.
Adam Smith
Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.
Aristotle
The reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property.
John Locke
Whenever there is a conflict between human rights and property rights, human rights must prevail.
Abraham Lincoln
On a long journey of human life, faith is the best of companions; it is the best refreshment on the journey; and it is the greatest property.
Buddha
Just as man can’t exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one’s rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property.
Ayn Rand
The best government rests on the people, and not on the few, on persons and not on property, on
the free development of public opinion and not on authority.
George Bancroft
I am for socialism, disarmament, and, ultimately, for abolishing the state itself… I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and the sole control of those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal.
Roger Baldwin
No man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic also.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What we call real estate – the solid ground to build a house on – is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
If property had simply pleasures, we could stand it; but its duties make it unbearable. In the interest of the rich we must get rid of it.
Oscar Wilde
No man but feels more of a man in the world if he have a bit of ground that he can call his own. However small it is on the surface, it is four thousand miles deep; and that is a very handsome property.
Charles Dudley Warner
Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.
Walter Lippmann
Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.
Martin Luther King
Few rich men own their property; the property owns them.
Robert Ingersoll
Don’t you know that if people could bottle the air they would? Don’t you know that there would be an American Air-bottling Association? And don’t you know that they would allow thousands and millions to die for want of breath, if they could not pay for air? I am not blaming anybody. I am just telling how it is.
Robert Ingersoll
It is preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly.
Bertrand Russell
Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
G. K. Chesterton
Authority is not a quality one person ”has,” in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him.
Erich Fromm
The right to private property meant at the same time the right and duty to be personally concerned about your own well-being, to be personally concerned about your family’s income, to be personally concerned about your future. This is hard work.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky
If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.
Ludwig von Mises
Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.
John Locke
Some people talk of morality, and some of religion, but give me a little snug property.
Maria Edgeworth
Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
Frederic Bastiat
The dichotomy between personal liberties and property rights is a false one. Property does not have rights. People have rights.
Potter Stewart
Upon the sacredness of property civilization itself depends – the right of the laborer to his hundred dollars in the savings bank, and equally the legal right of the millionaire to his millions.
Andrew Carnegie
Men would live exceedingly quiet if these two words, mine and thine were taken away.
Anaxagoras
No power on earth has a right to take our property from us without our consent.
John Jay
We take care of our health, we lay up money, we make our roof tight and our clothing sufficient, but who provides wisely that he shall not be wanting the best property of all – friends?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
[T]he recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain, not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing is to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be.
Oscar Wilde
So long as the great majority of men are not deprived of either property or honor, they are satisfied.
Niccolo Machiavelli
Property is the pivot of civilization.
Leon Samson
The slogan of the National Association of Landlords is the commaless “We Shelter You America.” The truth of the matter is, however, that landlords shelter no one, while in fact the law shelters them… from the immediate expropriation that would occur if there were not force of gun and jail to back up this phoney, abusive, so-called property right.
Fred Woodworth
As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson