Quotes · Skopia

22 quotes

The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said, "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Discourse on Inequality · 1755

★ 6.1

Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the clouds and the great sea, as well as the earth? Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?

Tecumseh

1810

★ 5.3

Speech · Political speech

My position as regards the moneyed interests can be put in a few words. In every civilized society property rights must be carefully safeguarded; ordinarily, and in the great majority of cases, human rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the long run identical; but when it clearly appears that there is a real conflict between them, human rights must have the upper hand, for property belongs to man and not man to property.

Theodore Roosevelt

1910

★ 5.3

Pamphlet · Political literature · Economic literature

The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

Karl Marx

The Communist Manifesto · 1848

★ 4.0

Autobiography and memoir

By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property...the landscape is deformed.

Henry David Thoreau

Walden · 1854

★ 3.9

Political literature

I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken a stronger hold on the affections of men, and where a profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Democracy in America · 1835

★ 3.8

Treatise · Political literature

The great and chief end, therefore, of men's uniting into commonwealths and putting themselves under government is the preservation of their property.

John Locke

Two Treatises of Government · 1690

★ 3.7

Letter

All Property indeed, except the Savage’s temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents & all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity & the Uses of it.

Benjamin Franklin

1783

★ 3.7

Political literature · Philosophical literature

Property is theft.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

1840

★ 3.7

One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk.

Crazy Horse

Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee · 1970

★ 3.7

Novel

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

The House of Seven Gables · 1851

★ 3.6

Novel

Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything, for 'tis the only thing in this world that lasts...'Tis the only thing worth working for, worth fighting for—worth dying for.

Margaret Mitchell

Gone with the Wind · 1936

★ 3.6

Film · Christmas (film) · Comedy (film) · Christmas · Comedy

I'm gonna give you to the count of 10, to get your ugly, yella, no-good keister off my property, before I pump your guts full of lead! 1...2...10!

Johnny

Home Alone · 1990

★ 3.6

Personal journal

Give a man the secure possession of bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him nine years lease of a garden, and he will convert it into a desert.

Arthur Young

1792

★ 3.5

Radio broadcast · Speech

Private property is a natural fruit of labor, a product of intense activity of man, acquired trough his energetic determination to ensure and develop with his own strength his own existence and that of his family, and to create for himself and his own an existence of just freedom, not only economic, but also political, cultural and religious.

Pope Pius XII

1944

★ 3.5

Treatise · Political literature

Man...has by nature a power...to preserve his property—that is, his life, liberty, and estate—against the injuries and attempts of other men.

John Locke

Two Treatises of Government · 1690

★ 2.1

Essay · Political literature

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

James Madison

Federalist 10 · 1787

★ 2.1

Economic literature · Political literature

No man made the land. It is the original inheritance of the whole species. Its appropriation is wholly a question of general expediency. When private property in land is not expedient, it is unjust.

John Stuart Mill

1848

★ 1.9

Political literature · Economic literature

The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.

Friedrich Hayek

The Road to Serfdom · 1944

★ 1.9

Religious literature · Economic literature

Private property is a necessary institution, at least in a fallen world; men work more and dispute less when goods are private than when they are common. But it is to be tolerated as a concession to human frailty, not applauded as desirable in itself.

R.H. Tawney

1926

★ 1.7

Essay · Political literature

The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results.

James Madison

Federalist 10 · 1787

★ 1.2

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

1889

★ 1.1

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