"Both free speech rights and property rights belong legally to individuals, but
their real function is social, to benefit vast numbers of people who do not
themselves exercise these rights."
- Thomas Sowell
"It is precisely those things which belong to 'the people' which have
historically been despoiled- wild creatures, the air, and waterways being
notable examples. This goes to the heart of why property rights are socially
important in the first place. Property rights mean self-interested monitors. No
owned creatures are in danger of extinction. No owned forests are in danger of
being leveled. No one kills the goose that lays the golden egg when it is his
goose."
- Thomas Sowell
"Neither 'property' nor the value of property is a physical thing. Property is a
set of defined options...It is that set of options which has economic
value...It is the options, and not the physical things, which are the
'property' - economically as well as legally... But because the public tends to
think of property as tangible, physical things, this opens the way politically
for government confiscation of property by forcibly taking away options while
leaving the physical objects untouched."
- Thomas Sowell
"The right of property is the guardian of every other right, and to deprive the
people of this, is in fact to deprive them of their liberty."
- Arthur Lee of Virginia
"Every man has by nature the right to possess property of his own. This is one
of the chief points of distinction between man and the lower animals."
- Pope Leo XIII
"Property is more than the thing which a person owns. It is elementary that it
includes the right to acquire, use, and dispose of it. The Constitution
protects these essential attributes of property .... There can be no conception
of property aside from its control and use, and upon its use depends its
value."
- Buchanan v. Warley (Supreme Court decision, 1917)
"No state shall ... deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due
process of law."
- U.S. Constitution, 14th Amendment
"I have no reason to suppose that he, who would take away my Liberty, would not
when he had me in his Power, take away everything else."
- John Locke
"The small landholders are the most precious part of a state."
- Thomas Jefferson
"You reproach us with planning to do away with your property. Precisely; that is
just what we propose."
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
"Those who cannot afford to sue currently have no protection of their property
rights if they come in conflict with a regulation."
- Sen. Steve Symms (R-ID, 1991)
"The general rule at least is, that while property may be regulated to a certain
extent, if regulation goes too far, it will be recognized as a taking."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
"They have erected a system of national land-use regulation that brings minimal
ecological benefits and substantial harm to the liberties of Americans."
- Richard Mintier
"Nothing is ours, which another may deprive us of."
- Thomas Jefferson
"He who is permitted by law to have no property of his own can with difficulty
conceive that property is founded in anything but force."
- Thomas Jefferson to Edward Bancroft, 1788. ME 19:41
"No other rights are safe where property is not safe."
- Daniel Webster
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the
most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under
omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep,
his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our
own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their
own conscience."
- C.S. Lewis
"If voting could change anything, it would be illegal."
- Graffiti
"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be
bought and sold are legislators."
- P. J. O'Rourke
"When a thing defies physical law, there's usually politics involved."
- O'Rourke, P.J. (1994),
"People with a mission to save the earth want the earth to seem worse than it is
so their mission will look more important."
- O'Rourke, P.J. (1994), All the trouble in the world. The lighter side of
famine, pestilence, destruction and death. Sydney (Picador), 171
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to
teenage boys."
- P. J. O'Rourke