Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Everybody works but the vacant lot
Let no man imagine that he has no influence.
Abolish all taxation save that upon land values.
Property in land is as indefensible as property in man.
Poorly paid labor is inefficient labor, the world over.
How many men are there who fairly earn a million dollars?
The people themselves must think, because the people alone can act.
Progressive societies outgrow institutions as children outgrow clothes.
That alone is wise which is just; that alone is enduring which is right.
It is not from top to bottom that societies die; it is from bottom to top.
There is danger in reckless change, but greater danger in blind conservatism.
Social progress makes the well-being of all more and more the business of each.
Charity is false, futile, and poisonous when offered as a substitute for justice.
How can a man be said to have a country when he has not right of a square inch of it.
That which is unjust can really profit no one; that which is just can really harm no one.
A good, very good, not to say admirable schoolmaster, but then he is only a schoolmaster.
If you would have the slave show the virtues of the freeman, you must first make him free.
He who sees the truth, let him proclaim it, without asking who is for it or who is against it.
The value of a thing is the amount of laboring or work that its possession will save the possessor.
I propose to beg no question to shrink from no conclusion, but to follow truth wherever it may lead.
Trade has ever been the extinguisher of war, the eradicator of prejudice, the diffuser of knowledge.
Man is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; the only animal that is never satisfied.
Poverty is the openmouthed relentless hell which yawns beneath civilized society. And it is hell enough.
Laissez faire (in its full true meaning) opens the way to the realization of the noble dreams of socialism.
As it is with an individual, so it is with a nation. One must produce to have, or one will become a have-not.
The man who gives me employment, which I must have or suffer, that man is my master, let me call him what I will.
For every social wrong there must be a remedy. But the remedy can be nothing less than the abolition of the wrong.
What protectionism teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.
What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power.
The state, it cannot too often be repeated, does nothing, and can give nothing, which it does not take from somebody.
There are people into whose heads it never enters to conceive of any better state of society than that which now exists.
Unless there be correct thought, there cannot be any action, and when there is correct thought, right action will follow.
The methods by which a trade union can alone act, are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical.
The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.
Passing into higher forms of desire, that which slumbered in the plant, and fitfully stirred in the beast, awakes in the man.
It is but a truism that labor is most productive where its wages are largest. Poorly paid labor is inefficient labor, the world over.
That amid our highest civilization men faint and die with want is not due to the niggardliness of nature, but to the injustice of man.
It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly.
God showers upon us his gifts-more than enough for all; But like swine scrambling for food, we tread them in the mire, and rend each other.
Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power.
The ideal social state is not that in which each gets an equal amount of wealth, but in which each gets in proportion to his contribution to the general stock.
For as labor cannot produce without the use of land, the denial of the equal right to the use of land is necessarily the denial of the labor to its own produce.
Capital is a result of labor, and is used by labor to assist it in further production. Labor is the active and initial force, and labor is therefore the employer of capital.
Private ownership of land is the nether mill-stone. Material progress is the upper mill-stone. Between them, with an increasing pressure, the working classes are being ground.
There can be to the ownership of anything no rightful title which is not derived from the title of the producer and does not rest upon the natural right of the man to himself.
Man must be doing something, or fancy that he is doing something, for in him throbs the creative impulse; the mere basker in the sunshine is not a natural, but an abnormal man.
I do not think that any sorrow of youth or manhood equalled in intensity or duration the black and hopeless misery which followed the wrench of transference from a happy home to a school.
The fundamental principle of human action, the law, that is to political economy what the law of gravitation is to physics is that men seek to gratify their desires with the least exertion
The word capital, as philologists trace it, comes down to us from a time when wealth was estimated in cattle, and a man's income depended upon the number of head he could keep for their increase.
There are only three ways by which any individual can get wealth — by work, by gift or by theft. And, clearly, the reason why the workers get so little is that the beggars and thieves get so much.