Property Quotes - Page 9

• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• And these great natural rights may be reduced to three principal or primary articles: the right of personal security; the right of personal liberty; and the right of private property; because as there is no other known method of compulsion, or of abridging man's natural free will, but by an infringement or diminution of one or other of these important rights, the preservation of these, inviolate, may justly be said to include the preservation of our civil immunities in their largest and most extensive sense.

  William Blackstone

  Wisdom, Men, Rights

  Sir William BLACKSTONE, Samuel Warren (1856). “Blackstone's Commentaries systematically abridged and adapted to the existing state of the law and constitution, with great additions. By Samuel Warren”, p.101

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• The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself.

  Edmund Burke

  Wisdom, Interesting, Politics

  Edmund Burke (2014). “Revolutionary Writings: Reflections on the Revolution in France and the First Letter on a Regicide Peace”, p.52, Cambridge University Press

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• All the controversialists who have become conscious of the real issue are already saying of our ideal exactly what used to be said of the Socialists' ideal. They are saying that private property is too ideal not to be impossible. They are saying that private enterprise is too good to be true. They are saying that the idea of ordinary men owning ordinary possessions is against the laws of political economy and requires an alteration in human nature.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Real, Men, Law

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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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• 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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• Freedom is not an empty sound; it is not an abstract idea; it is not a thing that nobody can feel. It means, - and it means nothing else, - the full and quiet enjoyment of your own property. If you have not this, if this be not well secured to you, you may call yourself what you will, but you are a slave.

  William Cobbett

  Wisdom, Mean, Ideas

  William Cobbett (2012). “A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland”, p.231, TAN Books

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• You may twist the word freedom as long as you please, but at last it comes to quiet enjoyment of your own property, or it comes to nothing. Why do men want any of those things that are called political rights and privileges? Why do they, for instance, want to vote at elections for members of parliament? Oh! Because they shall then have an influence over the conduct of those members. And of what use is that? Oh! Then they will prevent the members from doing wrong.

  William Cobbett

  Men, Rights, Long

  William Cobbett (2012). “A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland”, p.231, TAN Books

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• The right to work, I had assumed, was the most precious liberty that man possesses. Man has indeed as much right to work as he has to live, to be free, to own property.

  William O. Douglas

  Wisdom, Men, Liberty

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• The protection of private property does more than promote market efficiency; it enhances the level of human freedom in the most intimate and personal parts of our lives.

  Richard Allen Epstein

  Wisdom, Doe, Market Efficiency

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• The institution of private property... is undergoing, at this time, a strain never put on it before. Not because the corporation, in essence, is retrogressive or unrepublican, but because in fact, it is unrepublican, and for that reason retrogressive also.

  Peter S. Grosscup

  Essence, Politics, Corporations

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• The effect of the corporation, under the prevailing policy of the free, go-as-you-please method of organization and management, has been to drive the bulk of our people, other than farmers, out of property ownership; and, if allowed to go on as present, it will keep them out... The paramount problem is not how to stop the growth of property, and the building up of wealth, but how to manage it so that every species of property, like a healthy growing tree will spread its roots deeply and widely in the soil of a popular proprietorship.

  Peter S. Grosscup

  Building Up, Organization, Roots

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• The paramount problem... is how to make this new form of property ownership a workable agent toward repeopleizing the proprietorship of the country's industries. Open to the wage-earner of the country the road to proprietorship... not as a gratuity, but as their proper allotment out of the combined forces that have made the enterprise successful.

  Peter S. Grosscup

  Country, Successful, Agents

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• It is also true that the less possible it becomes for a man to acquire a new fortune, the more must the existing fortunes appear as privileges for which there is no justification. Policy is then certain to aim at taking these fortunes out of private hands, either by the slow process of heavy taxation of inheritance or by the quicker one of outright confiscation. A system based on private property and control of the means of production presupposes that such property and control can be acquired by any successful man.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Mean, Successful, Men

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• Only now are increasing numbers of political and social scientists beginning to realize that Kelso's theories provide a private-property-based alternative to the imminent passage of a government-distributed "guaranteed income" or "negative income tax."

  Hazel Henderson

  Wisdom, Government, Numbers

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• The party should stand for a constantly wider diffusion of property. That is the greatest social and economic security that can come to free men. It makes free men. We want a nation of proprietors, not a state of collectivists. That is attained by creating a national wealth and income, not by destroying it. The income and estate taxes create an orderly movement to diffuse swollen fortunes more effectively than all the quacks.

  Herbert Hoover

  Wisdom, Party, Men

  Herbert Hoover (1938). “Addresses upon the American road”

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• A community of small farmers... land property owners, will be the only assurance that the freedom our republic offers will be guaranteed to each and every citizen.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Wisdom, Land, Community

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• I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable, but the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Wisdom, Division, Politics

  Thomas Jefferson, Jean M. Yarbrough (1963). “The Essential Jefferson”, p.154, Hackett Publishing

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• The banks themselves were doing business on capitals three-fourths of which were fictitious. This fictitious capital... is now to be lost, and to fall on somebody; it must take on those who have property to meet it, and probably on the less cautious part, who, not aware of the impending catastrophe, have suffered themselves to contract, or to be in debt, and must now sacrifice their property of a value many times the amount of the debt. We have been truly sowing the wind, and are now reaping the whirlwind.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Wisdom, Fall, Sacrifice

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• Economic activity, especially the activity of a market economy, cannot be conducted in an institutional, juridical or political vacuum. On the contrary, it presupposes sure guarantees of individual freedom and private property, as well as a stable currency and efficient public services.

  Pope John Paul II

  Wisdom, Political, Vacuums

  Pope John Paul II (1996). “The Encyclicals of John Paul II”, Our Sunday Visitor (IN)

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• Property in everyday life, is the right of control.

  Louis O. Kelso

  Everyday, Politics, Life Is

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