PROPERTY QUOTES
quotations about property
There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property; of that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.
SIR WILLIAM BLACKSTONE
Commentaries on the Laws of England
Thieves respect property; they merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
G. K. CHESTERTON
The Man Who Was Thursday
At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Child of God
As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.
JAMES MADISON
The National Gazette, March 29, 1792
The best property is what can be carried ever with you.
LOUIS OF BAVARIA
attributed, Day's Collacon
A simple idea blinds us, and under the cover of darkness, much happens that most of us would reject if any of us looked. So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in ideas that we don't even notice how monstrous it is to deny ideas to a people who are dying without them. So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in culture that we don't even question when the control of that property removes our ability, as a people, to develop our culture democratically. Blindness becomes our common sense. And the challenge for anyone who would reclaim the right to cultivate our culture is to find a way to make this common sense open its eyes.
LAWRENCE LESSIG
Free Culture
Give a man the secure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him a nine years lease of a garden, and he will convert it into a desert.... The magic of PROPERTY turns sand to gold.
ARTHUR YOUNG
Travels
To some writers, nothing appears of so much consequence as the skillful regulation of property; because it is this much coveted object that gives birth to most disputes and most seditions.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
Property is the retaining fee of a nation.
DAVID IRVING
attributed, Day's Collacon
The whole title by which you possess your property, is not a title of nature but of a human institution.
BLAISE PASCAL
Discourses on the Condition of the Great
The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If "Thou shall not covet," and "Thou shall not steal," are not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society, before it can be civilized or made free.
JOHN ADAMS
A Defense of the Constitutions of Government
In the nature of things, those who have not 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 grows clamorous. It looks on property as its prey and plunder, and is naturally ready, at all times, for violence and revolution.
DANIEL WEBSTER
speech delivered at Plymouth, Massachusetts, "First Settlement of New England", December 22, 1820
Exclusiveness in property is a theft in nature.
JEAN PIERRE BRISSOT
attributed, Day's Collacon
We are passing from an age when the emphasis in all our legislation has been upon property over into an age when the emphasis is going to be more and more upon life. Not that we shall fail to recognize the sacred rights of property. I am one of the first to acknowledge the sacred rights of property. Why? Not because of its material intrinsic value--no, not that--but because property represents crystalized human life. That is the reason it is sacred. But when it comes into competition, in warfare with human life itself the decision of the future is going to be more often in the interest of life and less often in the interest of property. Do you realize that ninety-five per cent of all our statutes on our books here in this State, and throughout the country, deal with the protection of property, and only about five per cent of them deal with the protection of life? That was inevitable, for it is a part of our evolutionary, or growing-up process. But the time is coming when, if there is a conflict between stocks, bonds and dividends on the one hand and men, women and children on the other, the emphasis is more often going to be given in favor of the men, women and children.
GEORGE W. COLEMAN
"Speeches favoring and opposing the Initiative and Referendum", Debates in the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention 1917-1918
All community property is the grave of individual liberty.
AMOS DEAN
attributed, Day's Collacon
Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.
BILL GATES
attributed, Upgrade Your Brain: 52 brilliant ideas for everyday genius
In protecting property the government is doing something quite apart from merely keeping the peace. It is exerting coercion wherever that is necessary to protect each owner, not merely from violence, but also from peaceful infringement of his sole right to enjoy the thing owned.
ROBERT HALE
"Coercion and Distribution in a Supposedly Non-Coercive State", Political Science Quarterly, September 1923
All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations. This revolution has produced the most powerful and diverse spur to innovation of any in modern times. Yet a set of ideas about a central aspect of this prosperity -- "property" -- confuses us. This confusion is leading us to change the environment in ways that will change the prosperity. Believing we know what makes prosperity work, ignoring the nature of the actual prosperity all around, we change the rules within which the Internet revolution lives. These changes will end the revolution.
LAWRENCE LESSIG
The Future of Ideas
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.
KARL MARX
The Communist Manifesto
All property systems distribute freedoms and unfreedoms; no system of property can be described without qualification as a system of liberty. Someone may respond that the liberty to use what belongs to another is license not liberty, and so its exclusion should not really count against a private property system in the libertarian calculus. But the price of this maneuver is very high: not only does it commit the libertarian to a moralized conception of freedom of the sort that he usually shies away from (as in case of positive liberty), but it also means that liberty, so defined, can no longer be invoked to support property except in a question-begging way.
JEREMY WALDRON
"Property and Ownership", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy