Source: The Law (1850)
Context: Life, faculties, production — in other words, individuality, liberty, property — this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
“It seems to us that the past is our property. Well, on the contrary — we are its property, because we are not able to make changes in it, while it fills the whole of our existence.”
Klucz niebieski albo opowieści biblijne zebrane ku pouczeniu i przestrodze
Original: "Otóż przeciwnie – to my jesteśmy jej własnością, ponieważ nie jesteśmy w stanie dokonać w niej zmian, ona natomiast wypełnia całość naszego istnienia."
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Leszek Kolakowski 45
Philosopher, historian of ideas 1927–2009Related quotes
Letter to Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (1830)
Early Writings, translated and ed. by , p. 159. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/epm/3rd.htm
Context: Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc., in short, when we use it. Although private property conceives all these immediate realizations of possession only as means of life; and the life they serve is the life of private property, labor, and capitalization. Therefore all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple estrangement of all these senses – the sense of having. So that it might give birth to its inner wealth, human nature had to be reduced to this absolute poverty.
Speech to Parliament (11 May 1532), as quoted in Hall's Chronicle (1809), edited by Sir Henry Ellis, p. 788
Well-beloved subjects! we thought that the clergy of our realm had been our subjects wholly, but now, we have well perceived that they be but half our subjects; yea, and scarce our subjects, for all the prelates, at their consecration, take an oath to the Pope clean contrary to the oath they make to us, so that they seem to be his subjects and not ours.
Source: As quoted in English Constitutional History from the Teutonic Conquest to the Present Time (1905) by Thomas Pitt Taswell-Langmead, p. 332
Speech as president of a national convention of the Woman's National Loyal League (14 May 1863)
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 383.
Section 2, paragraph 25.
The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)