Property Quotes

The best government rests on the people, and not on the few, on persons and not on property, on the free development of public opinion and not on authority.

George Bancroft

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The reliance on property is... the want of self - Reliance. Men measure the esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property... Essays.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property.

Thomas Jefferson

Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich - - Something for nothing.

George Bernard Shaw

A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.

Adam Smith

A man can know nothing of mankind without knowing something of himself. Self - Knowledge is the property of that man whose passions have their full play, but who ponders over their results.

Benjamin Disraeli

I told my mother-in-law that my house was her house, and she said, ``Get the hell off my property.'

Joan Rivers

Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Economy, 1854

When neither their property nor their honor is touched, the marjority of men live content.

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad. I seek to preserve property and to respect order, and I equally decry the appeal to the passions of the many of the prejudices of the few.

Benjamin Disraeli

There exists a false aristocracy based on family name, property, and inherited wealth. But there likewise exists a true aristocracy based on intelligence, talent and virtue.

Tom Robbins

Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; have in general been as short in their lives as they are violent in their deaths.

James Madison, Federalist Papers (# 10)

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to opress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

Frederick Douglass, Speech, April 1886

Civilization is built on a number of ultimate principles... respect for human life, the punishment of crimes against property and persons, the equality of all good citizens before the law... or, in a word justice.

Max Nordau

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca, Epistles

Reason can never be popular. Passions and feelings may become popular, but reason will always remain the sole property of a few eminent individuals.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad. I seek to preserve property and to respect order, and I equally decry the appeal to the passions of the many or the prejudices of the few.

Benjamin Disraeli, campaign speech at High Wycombe, England, November 27, 1832

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire