Hilaire Belloc Quotes About Property

Quotes about: Property

• When the mass of families in a State are without property, then those who were once citizens become virtually slaves. The more the State steps in to enforce conditions of security and sufficiency; the more it regulates wages, provides compulsory insurance, doctoring, education, and in general takes over the lives of the wage-earners, for the benefit of the companies and men employing the wage-earners, the more is this condition of semi-slavery accentuated.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Men, Steps

• Coupled with Usury, Unrestricted Competition destroys the small man for the profit of the great and in so doing produces that mass of economically unfree citizens whose very political freedom comes in question because it has no foundation in any economic freedom, that is, any useful proportion of property to support it. Political freedom without economic freedom is almost worthless, and it is because the modern proletariat has the one kind of freedom without the other that its rebellion is now threatening the very structure of the modern world.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Men, Support

• Capitalism had arisen through the misuse and exaggeration of certain rights, notably the right of property - the basis of economic freedom - and the right of contract, which is one of the main functions of economic freedom. Therefore, even under Capitalism, so long as the old principles were remembered it was possible to recall the principles whereby Society had once been sane and well ordered.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Rights, Long, Principles

• Property, as a general social institution, well-divided property, having disappeared and Capitalism having taken its place, you cannot reverse the process without acting against natural economic tendencies.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Taken, Acting, Economic

  "An Essay on the Restoration of Property".

• It is therefore our business to restore economic freedom through the restoration of the only institution under which it flourishes, which institution is Property. The problem before us is, how to restore Property so that it shall be, as it was not so long ago, a general institution.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Long Ago, Restoration, Politics

  Hilaire Belloc (2002). “An Essay on the Restoration of Property”, p.26, IHS Press

• Under the old social philosophy which had governed the Middle Ages, temporal, and therefore all economic, activities were referred to an eternal standard. The production of wealth, it distribution and exchange were regulated with a view to securing the Christian life of Christian men. In two points especially was this felt: First in securing the independence of the family, which can only be done by the wide distribution of property, in others words the prevention of the growth of a proletariat; secondly, in the close connection between wealth and public function.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Christian, Philosophy, Men

• Had there been any existent vital and energetic institution left in Society after the Reformation for the use of small property in coordinated form-that is, in combination, so that the average man's holding could be put to useful purpose in company with the holdings of a great number of other men of his own sort, the new evils would not have arisen.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Men, Average

  Hilaire Belloc (2016). “The Crisis Of Civilization”, p.103, TAN Books

• Under the old philosophy which had governed the high Middle Ages things had been everywhere towards a condition of Society in which property was well distributed throughout the community, and thus the family rendered independent.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Philosophy, Independent, Community

  Hilaire Belloc (2016). “The Crisis Of Civilization”, p.84, TAN Books

• It is Mind which determines the change of Society, and it was because the mind at work was a Catholic mind that the slave became a serf and was on his way to becoming a peasant and a fully free man-a man free economically as well as politically. The whole spirit of the Church was for small property, and that spirit was slowly, instinctively, working for the establishment of small property throughout Christendom.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Men, Catholic, Mind

  Hilaire Belloc (2016). “The Crisis Of Civilization”, p.47, TAN Books

• We cannot make owners by merely giving men something to own. And, I repeat, whether there be sufficient desire for property left upon which we can work, only experience can decide.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Men, Giving

  Hilaire Belloc (2002). “An Essay on the Restoration of Property”, p.29, IHS Press

• Let us then repeat and firmly fix this main point: the evil, the root evil, of that to which the term Capitalism has come to be applied, is neither its functioning for profit nor its dependence upon legally protected private property; but the presence of a Proletariat, that is of men possessing political freedom, but dispossessed of economic freedom, and existing in such large numbers in any community as to determine the tone of all that community.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Men, Roots

  Hilaire Belloc (2016). “The Crisis Of Civilization”, p.108, TAN Books

• Ownership by delegation is a contradiction in terms. When men say, for instance (by a false metaphor), that each member of the public should feel himself an owner of public property-such as a Town Park-and should therefore respect it as his own, they are saying something which all our experience proves to be completely false. No man feels of public property that it is his own; no man will treat it with the care of the affection of a thing which is his own.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Men, Care, Politics

  Hilaire Belloc (2002). “An Essay on the Restoration of Property”, p.25, IHS Press

• In the midst of all these innumerable forms of a common protest and universal ill-ease there has grown up one definite body of doctrine whose adherents are called Communists and who desired the total subversion of what had been, hitherto unquestioned among civilized European men, the general doctrines of property and individual freedom.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Men, Doctrine

• But if we are to retain freedom, then we can only do so by keeping the determining mass of the citizens the possessors of property with personal control over it, as individuals or as families. For property is the necessary condition of economic freedom in the full sense of that term. He that has not property is under economic servitude to him who has property, whether the possessor of it be another individual or the State.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Citizens, Politics

  Hilaire Belloc (2016). “The Crisis Of Civilization”, p.110, TAN Books

• The larger the unit of capital present, the easier the transaction called emission of credit. Centralized lending of this kind (which is today universal) actively promotes the absorption of the small man by the great, the reduction of small property owners to a proletarian condition.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Men, Credit

  Hilaire Belloc (2016). “The Crisis Of Civilization”, p.97, TAN Books

• The restoration of property would be a complicated, arduous and presumably a lengthy business; the transformation of a Capitalist Society into a Communist one needs nothing but the extension of existing conditions.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Would Be, Needs, Restoration

• Economic freedom is in our eyes a good. It is among the highest of temporal goods because it is necessary to the highest life of society through the dignity of man and through the multiplicity of his action, in which multiplicity is life. Through well-divided property alone can the units of society react upon the State. Through it alone can a public opinion flourish. Only where the bulk of the cells are healthy can the whole organism thrive.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Eye, Men, Cells

  Hilaire Belloc (2002). “An Essay on the Restoration of Property”, p.26, IHS Press

• The term "Socialism" becomes a common label for the various theories of attack upon the principle of property, the various policies of communal control at the expense of the family and individual freedom.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Principles, Labels

  Hilaire Belloc (2016). “The Crisis Of Civilization”, p.116, TAN Books

• The choice lies between property on the one hand and slavery, public or private, on the other. There is no third issue.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Lying, Hands, Issues

  Hilaire Belloc (2002). “An Essay on the Restoration of Property”, p.20, IHS Press

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

  Hilaire Belloc

  Slavery, Institutions, Thirds

  Hilaire Belloc (1913). “The Servile State”

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