Liberalism Quotes - Page 11

• Collective property and individual property, these two banners will be the standards under which, from now on, the great battles of the future will be fought.

  Mikhail Bakunin

  Wisdom, Two, Battle

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• The origin of civilization is man's determination to do nothing for himself which he can get done for him.

  H. C. Bailey

  Wisdom, Determination, Men

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• Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms.

  Saint Augustine

  Wisdom, Taken, Justice

  Saint Augustine of Hippo, Catholic Way Publishing (2015). “The City of God”, p.161, Catholic Way Publishing

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• To seek the greatest good is to live well, and to live well is nothing other than to love God with the whole heart, the whole soul, and the whole mind: It is therefore obvious that this love must be kept whole and uncorrupt, that is temperance; it should not be overcome with difficulties, that is fortitude, it must not be subservient to anything else, that is justice; it must discriminate among things so as not to be deceived by falsity or fraud, that is prudence.

  Saint Augustine

  Wisdom, Heart, Justice

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• We must speak first about the division of land and about those who cultivate it: who should they be and what kind of person? We do not agree with those who have said that property should be communally owned, but we do believe that there should be a friendly arrangement for its common use, and that none of the citizens should be without means of support.

  Aristotle

  Wisdom, Believe, Mean

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• For suppose that every tool we had could perform its task, either at our bidding or itself perceiving the need, and if-like the statues made by Dædalus or the tripods of Hephæstus, of which the poet says that "self-moved they enter the assembly of the gods" - shuttles in a loom could fly to and fro and a plectrum play a lyre all self-moved, then master-craftsmen would have no need of servants nor masters of slaves.

  Aristotle

  Self, Play, Bidding

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• Tools may be animate as well as inanimate; for instance, a ship's captain uses a lifeless rudder, but a living man for watch; for a servant is, from the point of view of his craft, categorized as one of its tools. So any piece of property can be regarded as a tool enabling a man to live, and his property is an assemblage of such tools; a slave is a sort of living piece of property; and like any other servant is a tool in charge of other tools.

  Aristotle

  Men, Views, Watches

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• At times like the present, when the evils of unsound finance threaten us, the speculator may anticipate a harvest gathered from the misfortune of others, the capitalist may protect himself by hoarding or may even find profit in the fluctuations of values; but the wage earner - the first to be injured by a depreciated currency and the last to receive the benefit of its correction - is practically defenseless.

  Grover Cleveland

  Wisdom, Evil, Hoarding

  United States. President (1893-1897 : Cleveland), Grover Cleveland (1895*). “Special message, August 8th, 1893. Extract from third annual message, December 2nd, 1895”

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• I know that it is likely that as worship of the gods declines, faith between men and all human society will disappear, as well as that most excellent of all virtues, which is justice.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Wisdom, Men, Justice

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• A s laws multiply, injustice increases.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Wisdom, Law, Politics

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• 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

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• 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

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• For the mass of men the idea of artistic creation can only be expressed by an idea unpopular in present discussions - the idea of property... Property is merely the art of the democracy... One would think, to hear people talk, that the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers were on the side of property. But obviously they are the enemies of property; because they are enemies of their own limitations.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Art, Men, Thinking

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• 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

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• If the common man in the past had a grave respect for property, it may conceivably have been because he sometimes had some of his own.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Wisdom, Men, Past

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.336, Simon and Schuster

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• In the same way the eminence attaching to the mere possession of great wealth disappoints us nine times out of ten, especially if the wealth has been accumulated rapidly. For great wealth is accumulated rapidly by cunning or chance, or a mixture of the two. Cunning has nothing to do with high qualities; it is rather a presumption against them; while chance has nothing to do with them either. Therefore it is that men are always complaining after meeting So-and-so, that he seemed to be astonishingly stupid, though he made a million in ten years and started as a pauper.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Stupid, Men, Years

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• In the form of security and sufficiency for the men who labor to the profit of others, and in the form of registering and controlling them in the form of an organized public supervision of their labor, slavery is already afoot. When slavery shall succeed it will succeed through the acquiescence of those who will be enslaved, for they will prefer sufficiency and security with enslavement, to freedom, responsibility, insecurity and the threat of insufficiency.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Responsibility, Men

  Hilaire Belloc (2009). “Essays of a Catholic”, p.13, TAN Books

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• 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

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• Even if the wealth and power be well distributed throughout a community, its members will not be happy unless they are inwardly so, and obviously where the distribution is bad, where the few have a vast superfluity and the many are consumed by anxiety or want, or where a few controllers can exercise their will over the many, society has failed, even though its total wealth and power be increased.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Exercise, Community

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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, Political, World

  Hilaire Belloc (2016). “The Crisis Of Civilization”, p.102, TAN Books

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• Consider in what way the industrial system developed upon capitalist lines. Why were a few rich men put with such ease into possession of the new methods? Why was it normal and natural in their eyes and in that of contemporary society that those who produced the new wealth with the new machinery should be proletarian and dispossessed?

  Hilaire Belloc

  Eye, Men, Ease

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• Communism worked honestly by officials devoid of human frailties and devoted to nothing but the good of its slaves, would have certain manifest material advantages as compared with a proletarian wage-system where millions live in semi-starvation, and many millions more in permanent dread thereof. But even if it were administered thus Communism would only produce its benefits through imposing slavery.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Benefits, Slavery

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• ... But as a Godless greed pursued its career from excess to excess, it provoked a sort of twin hostile brother, equally Godless, born in the same atmosphere of utter disregard for the foundational virtues of humility and charity. This hostile twin brother of Capitalism was destined to be called Communism, and is today setting out to murder its elder.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Brother, Humility, Careers

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