Quotes About Private Property

“Throughout the world what remains of the vast public spaces are now only the stuff of legends: Robin Hood's forest, the Great Plains of the Amerindians, the steppes of the nomadic tribes, and so forth ... Rousseau said that the first person who wanted a piece of nature as his or her own exclusive possession and transformed it into the transcendent form of private property was the one who invented evil. Good, on the contrary, is what is common.”

— Antonio Negri

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

— Ludwig Von Mises

“The sun is pure communism everywhere but in cities, where it's private property.”

— Malcolm De Chazal

“At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only,-when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God's earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman's grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.”

— Henry David Thoreau

“Who can seriously doubt that a member of a small racial or religious minority will be freer with no property so long as fellow-members of his community have property and are therefore able to employ him, than he would be if private property were abolished and he became owner of a nominal share in the communal property?”

— Friedrich Hayek

“Fair enough." I managed a nod. "Still, you shouldn't be up here." "It's a free country." "It's a capitalist country and this is private property.”

— Andrea Cremer

“At one time, this gave rise to the question of whether the legal validity of the money was determined by the stamp of the ruler of the country or by the metal content of the coin; later, to the question of whether the command of the law or the free usage of business was to settle if the money was legal tender or not. The answer of public opinion, grounded on the principles of private property and the protection of acquired rights, ran the same in both cases: Prout quidque eontraetum est, ita et solvi debet; ut cum re eontraximus, re solvi debet, veluti cum mutuum dedimus, ut Tetro pecuniae tantundem solvi debeat.”

— Ludwig Von Mises

“Remove God from the world of ideas. Remove government, politics from society. Keep sex, humor, utilities. Let private property go.”

— John Cage

“Killing the private property-that was the center of the Marxist economy and Marxist ideology. That was the center of the Lenin ideology.”

— Anatoly Chubais

“When the proletariat declares the dissolution of the hitherto existing world order, it merely declares the secret of its own existence, since it is in fact the dissolution of this order. When it demands the negation of private property, it is only laying down as a principle for society what society has laid down as a principle for the proletariat, what has already been incorporated in itself without its consent as the negative result of society.”

— Karl Marx

“By virtue of our private property society, we have disconnected individuals from the land. We have put them in high rises and asked them to live their lives in urban settings, disconnected from the land.”

— Adam Dell

“The right to private property meant at the same time the right and duty to be personally concerned about your own well-being, to be personally concerned about your family's income, to be personally concerned about your future. This is hard work.”

— Mikhail Khodorkovsky

“The dream of socialists, the Maximum Programme, has always been to eliminate the private property, the family and the nation state. With the private property they have not succeeded, but they continue on the path of destruction of the family and the nation.”

— Vladimir Bukovsky

“There is a deliberate and quite outspoken attack on the whole idea of people owning private property.”

— Dixie Lee Ray

“Each man has an equal social right to multiply his power of motion by all the social factors of civilization. Private property in any of these factors is inconsistent with this fundamental right; it must, obviously, prove a source of economic despotism and industrial slavery.”

— Daniel De Leon

“It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.”

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

“I can quite understand a man accepting laws that protect private property, and admit of its accumulation, as long as he himself is able under those conditions to realise some form of beautiful and intellectual life. But it is almost incredible to me how a man whose life is marred and made hideous by such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance.”

— Oscar Wilde

“I read used books because fingerprint-smudged and dog-eared pages are heavier on the eye. Because every book can belong to many lives. Books should be kept in public places and step out with passersby who'll onto them for a spell. Books should die like people, consumed by aches and pains, infected, drowning off a bridge together with the suicides, poked into a potbellied stove, torn apart by children to make paper boats. They should die of anything, in other words, except boredom, as private property condemned to a life sentence on a shelf.”

— Erri De Luca

“Private property began the instant somebody had a mind of his own.”

— E.E. Cummings

“When I look out [the window] at the big houses on either side of the road, it's obvious we've entered the rich side of town. Poor people don't post signs like NO TRESPASSING, PRIVATE DRIVE, PRIVATE PROPERTY, MONITORED BY CAMERA SURVEILLANCE. I should know because I've been poor my entire life, and the only person I know who ever posted a sign like these is my friend ... and he actually stole the sign off a rich guy's yard.”

— Simone Elkeles

“Who wishes that there was a permanent, unalterable celestial despotism that subjected us to continual surveillance and could convict us of thought-crime, and who regarded us as its private property even after we died? How happy we ought to be, at the reflection that there exists not a shred of respectable evidence to support such a horrible hypothesis. And how grateful we should be to those of our predecessors who repudiated this utter negation of human freedom. There were many people long before Darwin or Einstein or even Galileo who saw through the claims of the rabbis and priests and imams. In earlier times, such repudiation often involved extraordinary courage. The ensuing pages will, I hope, introduce you to some of those who manifested this quality.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“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

“In practice, without appropriate government intervention, Smith's "invisible hand" dons brass knuckles and conducts gang warfare, creating fierce battles between competitors who would be more than happy to define and enforce their own private property interests according to their own subjective rules.”

— Denise Caruso

“Atheism is humanism mediated by the suppression of religion, communism is humanism mediated by
the suppression of private property.”

— Albert Camus

“Can a non-Western power really hope to benefit from downloading Western scientific knowledge, if it continues to reject that other key part of the West's winning formula: the third institutional innovation of private property rights, the rule of law and truly representative government?”

— Niall Ferguson

“The exercise of patience involves a continual practice of the presence of God, for we may be called upon at any moment for an almost heroic display of good temper. And it is a short road to unselfishness, for nothing is left to self. All that seems to belong most intimately to self, to be self's private property, such as time, home, and rest, are invaded by these continual trials of patience.”

— Frederick William Faber

“The Conservation Buck Challenge was designed to engage and mobilize the hunting community to preserve the outdoor experience for future generations. Our members will be ambassadors for ethical hunting, respect for private property rights, support for conservation funding and programs that give our children the chance to learn the valuable lessons of nature.”

— Gary Morris

“Private property implies exclusivity, inequality, and difference.”

— Hans-Hermann Hoppe

“[O]ne of the greatest difficulties encountered in bringing about favorable change is this almost inescapable illusion that there is a perduring, unique, simple existent self, [which is] in some strange fashion, the patient's, or the subject person's, private property.”

— Harry Stack Sullivan

“What I do know is, in little more than 30 years, we have gone from a nation where the "quiet enjoyment" of one's private property was a sacred right, to a day when the so-called property "owner" faces a hovering hoard of taxmen and regulators threatening to lien, foreclose, and "go to auction" at the first sign of private defiance of their collective will ... a relationship between government and private property rights which my dictionary defines as "fascism."”

— Vin Suprynowicz

“Consider the sexual harassment which continually occurs between a secretary and a boss ... while objectionable to many women, [it] is not a coercive action. It is rather part of a package deal in which the secretary agrees to all aspects of the job when she agrees to accept the job, and especially when she agrees to keep the job. The office is, after all, private property. The secretary does not have to remain if the 'coercion' is objectionable.”

— Walter Block

“Are you aware it is private property? Why you'll be asking be to bomb Essen next.”

— Kingsley Wood

“Private property is a means, and neither its abolition nor its unrestricted right should be an end in itself”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

“One of the most extraordinary examples in recent decades [of unitary visions of constitutional enterprise] is found in a book called "Takings" ... Epstein makes an extremely clever but stunningly reductionist argument that the whole Constitution is really designed to protect private property ... Can a constitution reflecting as diverse an array of visions and aspirations as ours really be reducible to such as sadly single-minded vision as that?”

— Laurence Tribe

“The freer the market is and the more respect you have for private property, the better the environment is protected.”

— Ron Paul

“Once the law, properly enacted, is routinely ignored, and ignored with the blessing and the promotion of the political class, then you have a breakdown of organized society. And there is nothing compassionate about what's happening to the people of Arizona. There is nothing compassionate about the violation of private property rights. There is nothing compassionate about the abuse of the taxpayer. There is nothing compassionate about the closing of schools and hospitals. Nothing at all compassionate about increased drug trafficking and crime. Nothing compassionate about that at all.”

— Rush Limbaugh

“Gays have become colossal bores. Once interesting and iconoclastic, all they seem to crave nowadays is the State's pension and seal of approval. They ought to go back to the days of the Stonewall Riots, when the police's violations of privacy and private property were the object of their anger and activism.”

— Ilana Mercer

“It is true that the welfare-statists are not socialists, that they never advocated or intended the socialization of private property, that they want to 'preserve' private property-with government control of its use and disposal. But that is the fundamental characteristic of fascism.”

— Ayn Rand

“Any material element or resource which, in order to become of use or value to men, requires the application of human knowledge and effort, should be private property-by the right of those who apply the knowledge and effort.”

— Ayn Rand

“The True conservative seeks to protect the system of private property and free enterprise by correcting such injustices and inequalities as arise from it. The most serious threat to our institutions comes from those who refuse to face the need for change. Liberalism becomes the protection for the far-sighted conservative.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

“The function of Government must be to favor no small group at the expense of its duty to protect the rights of personal freedom and of private property of all its citizens.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

“The two big mistakes were the belief in a sky god - that there's a man in the sky with 10 things he doesn't want you to do and you'll burn for a long time if you do them - and private property, which I think is at the core of our failure as a species. That's the source of my indignations, my dissatisfactions, however it comes out on the stage. I feel betrayed by the people I'm part of, these creatures, these magnificent creatures.”

— George Carlin

“Private property is a natural fruit of labor, a product of intense activity of man, acquired through 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

“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

“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

“Private property works like circuitry in electronics, or piping in hydraulics. It conveys wages to the owners of labor power, as well as the various forms of nonwage property income to the owners of capital. In itself, it is no more responsible for maldistribution of purchasing power than the science of bookkeeping is responsible for bankruptcy.”

— Louis O. Kelso

“If history could prove and teach us anything, it would be the private ownership of the means of production as a necessary requisite of civilization and material well-being. All civilizations have up to now been based on private property. Only nations committed to the principle of private property have risen above penury and produced science, art, and literature. There is no experience to show that any other social system could provide mankind with any of the achievements of civilization.”

— Ludwig Von Mises

“But the instinct of hoarding, like all other instincts, tends to become hypertrophied and perverted; and with the institution of private property comes another institution-that of plunder and brigandage. In private life, no motive of action is at present so powerful and so persistent as acquisitiveness, which unlike most other desires, knows no satiety. The average man is rich enough when he has a little more than he has got, and not till then.”

— William Ralph Inge

“The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with there capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”

— Karl Marx