“We have to harmonize the two facts, that wealth is good and necessary, and that wealth is a danger to its possessor and to society. On the one hand property is indispensable to personal freedom, to all higher individuality, and to self-realization; the right to property is a corollary of the right to life; without property men are at the mercy of nature and in bondage to those who have property. On the other hand property is used as a means of collecting tribute and private taxes, as a club with which to extort unearned gain from laborers and consumers, and as the fundamental tool of oppression.”

— Walter Rauschenbusch

Source: The Social Principles of Jesus (1918), p. 127

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Walter Rauschenbusch 83

United States Baptist theologian 1861–1918

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“A natural-rights libertarian values the life of the innocent individual. Only by protecting each individual's rights—life, liberty and property—can the government legitimately enhance the wealth of the collective. Only through fulfilling its night watchman role can government legitimately safeguard the wealth of the nation. For each individual, secure in his person and property, is then free to pursue economic prosperity, which redounds to the rest.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

Barcelona and Beyond: How Politicians & Policy Wonks Play God With Your Life http://dailycaller.com/2017/08/21/barcelona-and-beyond-how-politicians-wonks-play-god/, Daily Caller, August 21, 2017.
Barcelona and Beyond: How Politicians & Policy Wonks Play God With Your Life http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/08/barcelona_and_beyond_how_politicians_and_policy_wonks_play_god_with_your_life_.html, American Thinker, August 20, 2017.
2010s, 2017

“No, on the contrary, the Constitution exists to protect that right. The important point is that the Constitution exists to protect individual liberty and individual property. In fact, the most important of all of the rights, really the foundation of all rights, are the rights to private property. But the right to private property is a right for each individual human being to own himself.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Q&A

“Property rights are not like other rights, contrary to what Madison and a lot of modern political theory says. If I have the right to free speech, it doesn't interfere with your right to free speech. But if I have property, that interferes with your right to have that property, you don't have it, I have it. So the right to property is very different from the right to freedom of speech. This is often put very misleadingly about rights of property; property has no right. But if we just make sense out of this, maybe there is a right to property, one could debate that, but it's very different from other rights.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Quotes 1990s, 1995–1999, The Common Good (1998)

“When the rich plunder the poor of his rights, it becomes an example of the poor to plunder the rich of his property, for the rights of the one are as much property to him as wealth is property to the other and the little all is as dear as the much. It is only by setting out on just principles that men are trained to be just to each other; and it will always be found, that when the rich protect the rights of the poor, the poor will protect the property of the rich.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

1790s, Letter to the Addressers (1792)
Context: It is from a strange mixture of tyranny and cowardice that exclusions have been set up and continued. The boldness to do wrong at first, changes afterwards into cowardly craft, and at last into fear. The Representatives in England appear now to act as if they were afraid to do right, even in part, lest it should awaken the nation to a sense of all the wrongs it has endured. This case serves to shew that the same conduct that best constitutes the safety of an individual, namely, a strict adherence to principle, constitutes also the safety of a Government, and that without it safety is but an empty name. When the rich plunder the poor of his rights, it becomes an example of the poor to plunder the rich of his property, for the rights of the one are as much property to him as wealth is property to the other and the little all is as dear as the much. It is only by setting out on just principles that men are trained to be just to each other; and it will always be found, that when the rich protect the rights of the poor, the poor will protect the property of the rich. But the guarantee, to be effectual, must be parliamentarily reciprocal.

“In every civilized society property rights must be carefully safeguarded; ordinarily, and in the great majority of cases, human rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the long run identical; but when it clearly appears that there is a real conflict between them, human rights must have the upper hand, for property belongs to man and not man to property.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, Citizenship in a Republic (1910)

“Property is not a natural and divine, but conventional right; it is the mere creature of society and law… if private property generally were so used to injure, instead of promote public good, then society might and ought to destroy the whole institution.”

George Fitzhugh (1806–1881) American activist

Source: Sociology For The South: Or The Failure Of A Free Society (1854), p. 185

“As to the Income Tax, my opinion is that the needful revenue would be fairly and most fairly raised if paid by property, and by individuals in proportion to their property…A Property Tax should be an assessment upon all land and buildings, and canals and railroads, but not on property such as machinery, stock in trade, etc. The aristocracy have squeezed all they can out of the mass of the consumers, and now they lay their daring hands on those not wholly impoverished.”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Letter to his sister Margaret on Sir Robert Peel's budget (1842), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), pp. 72-73.
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“In civil law the existing property relationships are declared to be the result of the general will. The jus utendi et abutendi itself asserts on the one hand the fact that private property has become entirely independent of the community, and on the other the illusion that private property itself is based solely on the private will, the arbitrary disposal.”

Karl Marx book The German Ideology

Source: The German Ideology (1845/46), pp. 188

“Acceptance of the Catholic position implies a certain willingness to see the present injustices of society continue… Individual salvation implies liberty, which is always extended by Catholic writers to include the right to private property. But in the stage of industrial development which we have now reached, the right to private property means the right to exploit and torture millions of one's fellow creatures. The Socialist would argue, therefore, that one can only defend property if one is more or less indifferent to economic justice.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Source: Review of Communism and Man by F. J. Sheed in Peace News (27 January 1939)

“Animals are no one’s property, and they have the right not be ‘taken,’ ‘harvested,’ or ‘culled’ or any other euphemism for murder that wildlife managers use. They are no one’s property, just as you and I are no one’s property other than our own.”

Wayne Pacelle (1965) American activist

"Sabotaging Animal Rights for Deer Hunt," 1986

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Walter Rauschenbusch 83

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