“Nature having given no property to anyone.”

Letter to Marin Mersenne (1637) as quoted by D. E. Smith & M. L. Latham Tr. The Geometry of René Descartes (1925)

Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Section III On The Principles Of The Form Of The Sensible World

Letter to Isaac McPherson http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12.html (13 August 1813) ME 13:333.<br>The sentence He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. is sometimes paraphrased as &quot;Knowledge is like a candle. Even as it lights a new candle, the strength of the original flame is not diminished.&quot; <br class="br">1810s <br class="br">Context: It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

Original: (fr) La propriété exclusive est un vol dans la nature.

Quoted in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 615.

Source: Modularity of Mind (1983), p. 107–108 as cited in: Philip Robbins, &quot; Modularity of Mind http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/modularity-mind/&quot;, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

The DotCommunist Manifesto, UNC-Chapel Hill, Howard W. Odum Institute, November 8, 2001 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2263095526020953463.

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

1860s, Speech at Hartford (1860)