Property Quotes

Our goals can only be achieved with a society that respects and equally protects the rights of every human being, old and young, rich and poor, regardless of gender, color, race, or creed. We must reject the initiation of violence by individuals or government as morally repugnant.

~ Ron Paul

Property is not the natural and obvious and inevitable concept that most people think it is.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

If the Pentateuch is not inspired in its astronomy, geology, geography, history or philosophy, if it is not inspired concerning slavery, polygamy, war, law, religious or political liberty, or the rights of men, women and children, what is it inspired in, or about? The unity of God?—that was believed long before Moses was born. Special providence?—that has been the doctrine of ignorance in all ages. The rights of property?—theft was always a crime. The sacrifice of animals?—that was a custom thousands of years before a Jew existed. The sacredness of life?—there have always been laws against murder. The wickedness of perjury?—truthfulness has always been a virtue. The beauty of chastity?—the Pentateuch does not teach it. Thou shalt worship no other God?—that has been the burden of all religions.

~ Robert G. Ingersoll

In fact, if law were restricted to protecting all persons, all liberties, and all properties; if law were nothing more than the organized combination of the individual's right to self-defense; if law were the obstacle, the check, the punisher of all oppression and plunder — is it likely that we citizens would then argue much about the extent of the franchise?

~ Frédéric Bastiat

Torturing innocents, murdering civilians and destroying public property; they are all the gifts we have been given by religion.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

Nobody is sure of his life, property and health when the parliament deliberates.

~ Janusz Korwin-Mikke

Do you know how they brainwash people? They repeat something over and over. And that's what we do in this country. Owning things is good. More money is good. More property is good. More commercialism is good. More is good. More is good. We repeat it-- and have it repeated to us-- over and over until nobody bothers to even think otherwise. The average person is so fogged up by all this, he has no perspective on what's really important anymore.

~ Mitch Albom

You know that when a group of utility workers are withholding their customer service identification cards, they are likely engaging in some form of illegal activity at your home.

~ Steven Magee

Americans think New Yorkers are property obsessed, but clearly they haven’t lived a day in Hong Kong. In this part of the world, a man isn’t a man until he is a homeowner. His entire life leads up to the singular moment when he hands over the down-payment check and puts his signature on the triplicate purchase agreement. All the good grades and job promotions he has received are mere preparation; and every source of happiness - marriage, children and retirement - depends on it.

~ Jason Y. Ng

My grandfather used to say ‘It is my house I am paying the bills’,my dad used to say ‘this is my house I pay the mortgage’,my generation is saying this is my house I pay the rent.

~ Csaba Gabor-B.

Libertarianism holds that the only proper role of violence is to defend person and property against violence, that any use of violence that goes beyond such just defense is itself aggressive, unjust, and criminal

~ Murray N. Rothbard

Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.

~ Aldous Huxley

Go to hell.I've already been there. I own property in it.

~ Tessa Bailey

The purchaser draws boundaries, fences himself in, and says, “This is mine; each one by himself, each one for himself.” Here, then, is a piece of land upon which, henceforth, no one has a right to step, save the proprietor and his friends; which can benefit nobody, save the proprietor and his servants. Let these sales multiply, and soon the people — who have been neither able nor willing to sell, and who have received none of the proceeds of the sale — will have nowhere to rest, no place of shelter, no ground to till. They will die of hunger at the proprietor’s door, on the edge of that property which was their birthright; and the proprietor, watching them die, will exclaim, “So perish idlers and vagrants!

~ Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

What is this you call property? It cannot be the earth. For the land is our mother, nourishing all her children, beasts, birds, fish, and all men. The woods, the streams, everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of all. How can one man say it belongs to him only?

~ Massasoit

For the same reason a disease cannot be cured by more of the germ that caused it, the inflation and debt accumulation of the Obama years will not inflate our way out of it.

~ Ron Paul

Just as sex is a God-given instinct for the prolongation of the human race, so the desire for property as a prolongation of one's ego is a natural right sanctioned by natural law. A person is free on the inside because he can call his soul his own; he is free on the outside because he can call property his own. Internal freedom is based upon the fact that I am; external freedom is based on the fact that I have. But just as the excesses of flesh produce lust, for lust is sex in the wrong place, so there can be a deordination of the desire for property until it becomes greed, avarice, and capitalistic aggression.

~ Fulton J. Sheen

Take one famous example: arguments about property destruction after Seattle. Most of these, I think, were really arguments about capitalism. Those who decried window-breaking did so mainly because they wished to appeal to middle-class consumers to move towards global exchange-style green consumerism, and to ally with labor bureaucracies and social democrats abroad. This was not a path designed to provoke a direct confrontation with capitalism, and most of those who urged us to take this route were at least skeptical about the possibility that capitalism could ever really be defeated. Many were in fact in favor of capitalism, if in a significantly humanized form. Those who did break windows, on the other hand, didn't care if they offended suburban homeowners, because they did not figure that suburban homeowners were likely to ever become a significant element in any future revolutionary anticapitalist coalition. They were trying, in effect, to hijack the media to send a message that the system was vulnerable -- hoping to inspire similar insurrectionary acts on the part of those who might be considering entering a genuinely revolutionary alliance; alienated teenagers, oppressed people of color, undocumented workers, rank-and-file laborers impatient with union bureaucrats, the homeless, the unemployed, the criminalized, the radically discontent. If a militant anticapitalist movement was to begin, in America, it would have to start with people like these: people who don't need to be convinced that the system is rotten, only, that there's something they can do about it. And at any rate, even if it were possible to have an anticapitalist revolution without gun-battles in the streets -- which most of us are hoping it is, since let's face it, if we come up against the US army, we will lose -- there's no possible way we could have an anticapitalist revolution while at the same time scrupulously respecting property rights. Yes, that will probably mean the suburban middle class will be the last to come on board. But they would probably be the last to come on board anyway.

~ David Graeber

The pyramid shape is said to hold many secrets and amazing properties. One of them is a sense of wonder.

~ Vera Nazarian

If we do not restore the Institution of Property we cannot escape restoring the Institution of Slavery, there is no third course.

~ Hilaire Belloc

...A vision from a universe where the Equal Rights Amendment--with its redefinition of personhood--is rejected by the house of deputies: A universe where to die is to become property and to be created outwith a gift of parental DNA is to be doomed to slavery.

~ Charles Stross

The “pursuit of happiness” is such a key element of the “American (ideological) dream” that one tends to forget the contingent origin of this phrase: “We holds these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Where did the somewhat awkward “pursuit of happiness” come from in this famous opening passage of the US Declaration of Independence? The origin of it is John Locke, who claimed that all men had the natural rights of life, liberty, and property— the latter was replaced by “the pursuit of happiness” during negotiations of the drafting of the Declaration, as a way to negate the black slaves’ right to property.

~ Slavoj Žižek

You are not property. If you choose to leave, no one will stop you.

~ Elizabeth Vaughan

Water belongs to us all. Nature did not make the sun one person's property, nor air, nor water, cool and clear.

~ Michael Simpson

In my mind, I could sense their roots under the soil, creeping in helical tangles of ever-increasing complexity outward and in all directions—out beyond the perimeter of the Helsingør Wood, out below Yami’s Under City, out along the banks of the river, out to the nearest coast and thereupon out into the sea; the roots crept down further along the continental shelf, downward into the abysses, downward into the ocean floor, burrowing under the corals and under trenches, and then back up again to sprout in the darkened forest on a foreign continent: all the trees of the world now had conjoined roots, for they were now of one conjoined consciousness!

~ Ashim Shanker

For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses.

~ Oscar Wilde

It’s herding kittens. If kittens had a lot of guns and an overdose of neo-Libertarian property theory.

~ James S.a. Corey

That which is worth telling is not worth having.

~ Raheel Farooq

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

To make a claim of ownership implies a claim against others. That is, others must refrain from interfering with your use of that thing. As such the very act of the body occupying its standing room is to make a claim against others because only one body can occupy the space at a time.

~ Daniel Alexander Brackins

Because rights are only claims against other people, and not claims on other people and their property, rights end when they infringe on the rights of others.

~ Daniel Alexander Brackins

Property has its duties as well as its rights.

~ Thomas Drummond

Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.

~ Bill Gates

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

It wouldn't be fair to say that conservatives cherish property the way liberals cherish equality. But it would be fair to say that the takings clause is the conservatives' recipe for judicial activism just as they say liberals have misused the equal protection clause.

~ Michael Kinsley

The Olympic Spirit is neither the property of one race nor of one age.

~ Pierre De Coubertin

If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

No power on earth has a right to take our property from us without our consent.

~ John Jay

Avoid lawsuits beyond all things; they pervert your conscience, impair your health, and dissipate your property.

~ Jean De La Bruyère