Quotes about property
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“You see by what has happened that we are superior to you in intelligence, in size of army, and in number of supporters. Surely you were easily trapped, captured without a struggle. It is in my power to do with you what I wish when I wish. Helpless and prostrate, you lie before us now, victims of our might. But if one looks for a punishment equal to the crimes you have committed, it is impossible to find a suitable one. You murdered your revered and benevolent old emperor, the man whom it was your sworn duty to protect. The empire of the Roman people, eternally respected, which our forefathers obtained by their valiant courage or inherited because of their noble birth, this empire you shamefully and disgracefully sold for silver as if it were your personal property. But you were unable to defend the man whom you yourselves had chosen as emperor. No, you betrayed him like the cowards you are. For these monstrous acts and crimes you deserve a thousand deaths, if one wished to do to you what you have earned. You see clearly what it is right you should suffer. But I will be merciful. I will not butcher you. My hands shall not do what your hands did. But I say that it is in no way fit or proper for you to continue to serve as the emperor's bodyguard, you who have violated your oath and stained your hands with the blood of your emperor and fellow Roman, betraying the trust placed in you and the security offered by your protection. Still, compassion leads me to spare your lives and your persons. But I order the soldiers who have you surrounded to cashier you, to strip off any military uniform or equipment you are wearing, and drive you off naked. 9. And I order you to get yourselves as far from the city of Rome as is humanly possible, and I promise you and I swear it on solemn oath and I proclaim it publicly that if any one of you is found within a hundred miles of Rome, he shall pay for it with his head.”

Septimius Severus (145–211) Emperor of Ancient Rome

Herodian, Book II.

Death, People, Lie, Way

“[AL] views life as a property of the organization of matter, rather than a property of the matter which is so organized. Whereas biology has largely concerned itself with the material basis of life, Artificial Life is concerned with the formal basis of life.”

Christopher Langton (1949) American computer scientist

Source: Artificial Life (1989), p.2

Life

“When humus remains constantly damp, without, however, being covered with water, it forms a very unpleasant smelling acid, which is more particularly, characterized by the property which it possesses of colouring blue litmus paper into red. This circumstance has long been known, and it is the reason that land and meadows which are not properly drained, and which exhibit these phenomena, are called sour. We have carefully examined these facts, and have endeavoured to discover the peculiar constitution of this acid. At first, we were inclined to regard it as being of a distinct nature, and having carbon for its base; but we have since become convinced that it is generally composed of acetic acid, and occasionally contains a portion of the phosphoric. This latter always adheres so firmly to the humus that it cannot be separated from it either by boiling or washing. The liquid in which the humus is boiled certainly acquires a slight acid flavour, but the greater part of the acid remains attached to the humus.
This acid or sour humus it not at all of a fertilizing nature; on the contrary, it is prejudicial to vegetation* Where it is very strong and pervades the whole of the humus, the soil only produces reeds, rushes, sedge, and other useless, unpalatable plants; and whenever these abound, it may be inferred that the soil contains a great deal of sour or acid humus… There are various means of getting rid of this baneful property, and rendering the humus fertile. It is well known that with the aid of alkalies, ashes, lime, and marl, humus may be deprived of its acidity, and rendered easily soluble… Heaths do not thrive where this humus does not exist, and when they have established themselves in one particular spot, they suffer few other plants to appear. This humus may be changed by a dressing composed of marl, lime, or ammonia; and where this has been mixed with the soil, the heaths, &c., speedily perish.”

Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828) German agronomist and an avid supporter of the humus theory for plant nutrition

Source: The Principles of Agriculture, 1844, Section III: Agronomy, p. 343-4, as cited in Ruffin (1852, p. 85).

Nature, Strong, Suffering, Water

“The final result of our researches has widened the class of substances sensitive to light vibrations, until we can propound the fact of such sensitiveness being a general property of all matter.”

Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) scientist and inventor known for his work on the telephone

Statement to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Boston, Massachusetts (27 August 1880): published as "On the Production and Reproduction of Sound by Light" in American Journal of Sciences, Third Series, vol. XX, n°118 (October 1880), pp. 305-324.

Light

“Imagine my surprise one day in February 1951 to read in the newspaper that John J. McCloy, the high commissioner to Germany, had restored all the Krupp properties that had been ordered confiscated.”

William J. Wilkins

William J. Wilkins, judge at the Nuremberg Trial of War Criminals source: NYT http://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/14/obituaries/w-j-wilkins-98-was-judge-at-trial-of-nazi-industrialists.html

Imagination, Reading

“The Church owns property, needs income, employs men, works on human material, and banks on its moral prestige. Its present efficiency and future standing are bound up for weal or woe with the social welfare of the people and with the outcome of the present struggle.”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Introduction, p.xiv

Men, People, Future

“Let me examine the alleged "distinction from capitalism" characteristic of the Soviet Union and see whether it isn't a distinction from a certain stage of capitalism rather than from capitalism as a whole. The determining factor in analyzing the class nature of a society is not whether the means of production are the private property of the capitalist class or are state-owned, but whether the means of production … are monopolized and alienated from the direct producers. The Soviet Government occupies in relation to the whole economic system the position which a capitalist occupies in relation to a single enterprise. … "Bureaucratic state socialism" is an irrational expression behind which there exists the real economic relation of state-capitalist-exploiter to the propertyless exploited.”

Raya Dunayevskaya (1910–1987) American philosopher

"The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a Capitalist Society" (1941), in Russia: From Proletarian Revolution to State-Capitalist Counter-Revolution (2017), p. 210

Nature

“Principle #1: Avoid dangerous people and dangerous places.
Principle #2: Do not defend your property.
Principle #3: Respond immediately and escape.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris, The Truth about Violence http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-truth-about-violence, "3 Principles of Self-Defense", November 5, 2011. 2010s

People

“Miracles of consciousness aside, I see no way for women to defeat or transfer patriarchy without achieving power. Unlike male groups, women have little power with which to either avoid or commit violence. Women traditionally are physically weak and politically powerless in a culture that values physical strength and its extended representation in the form of weaponry and money. Women, like men, must be capable of violence or self-defense before their refusal to use violence constitutes a free and moral choice, rather than "making the best of a bad bargain." Survival is the characteristic property of power.”

Phyllis Chesler (1940) Psychotherapist, college professor, and author

Women and Madness (2005), p. 341, and see Women and Madness (1972), p. 292 (similar text).
Women and Madness (1972, 2005)

Women, Men, Money, Way

“If a firearm is used by a criminal or psychopath with evil intentions, then it is a tool for evil. But if it is used for good (to defend life and property), then it is a tool for good. A firearm by itself has no sentience, no volition, no moral force, and no politics. The proper term for this is an adiaphorous object--something that is neither good nor evil. A firearm is simply a cleverly-designed construction of metal, wood, and plastic in the form of a precision tool.”

James Wesley Rawles (1960) Survivalist-fiction author and blogger

Source: Tools For Survival (2009), p. 150

Life, Evil

“…There are three groups in Hindustan which are known for the qualities of fanaticism and zeal. So long as these three are not exterminated, no king can feel secure, nor any noble. The people (read Muslims) also will not be able to live in peace.
Religious as well as worldly interests dictate that soon after winning the war with the Marhatahs, you should turn towards the forts of the Jats, and conquer them with the blessings from the hidden (occult) world. Next is the turn of the Sikhs. This group should also be defeated, while waiting for grace from Allah.
…I appeal to you in the name of Allah and his Prophet that you should not cast your eye on the property of any Muslim. If you take care in this regard, there is hope that the doors of victory will be opened to you one after another. But if this caution is ignored, I fear that the wails of the oppressed may become obstacles in the way towards your goal.”

Shah Waliullah Dehlawi (1703–1762) Indian muslim scholar

To Najibuddaulah Translated from the Urdu version of K.A. Nizami, Shãh Walîullah Dehlvî ke Siyãsî Maktûbãt, Second Edition, Delhi, 1969, pp.104-05.
From his letters

War, People, World, Fear

“The notion of system we are interested in may be described generally as a complex of elements or components directly or indirectly related in a network of interrelationships of various kinds, such that it constitutes a dynamic whole with emergent properties.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Society: A Complex Adaptive System--Essays in Social Theory, (1998), p. 35 as cited in: Kenneth D. Bailey (2006) A Typology of Emergence in Social Systems and Sociocybernetic Theory http://www.unizar.es/sociocybernetics/congresos/DURBAN/papers/bailey.pdf.

“They must not have security. If Muslims have no security, neither must they. When there is no security for a Muslim's life, land, honor, and property, why should they have security? They are the people of “Dar Al-Harb,” so why should they have security?…Another thing, set aside the disagreements. They do not like the Kurds, nor the Arabs, the Sunnis, nor the Shiites. They have come to fight the people of Iraq. Basically, they have come to fight Islam. There is no need for wars between the Kurds and Arabs and the Sunni and Shiites. All of you gather under one flag.”

Ahmad Jannati (1927) Iranian ayatollah

Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati in his Tehran University Friday Sermon: Muslims Should Endanger English and American Interests http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/92.htm June 2004. Message to Iraqis, 2004

Life, War, People, Fight

“Religion is essentially universal. If God is our common Father, His truth is our common property. But the religious world may be likened to a vast market, where every religious sect sells only a portion of truth. Religion is many-sided; but each individual, each nation, oftentimes adopts and represents only one side of religion. In different times and in different countries, therefore, we see not the entire religious life of humanity, but only partial religious life.”

Keshub Chunder Sen (1838–1884) Indian academic

Speech delivered at Freemasons’ Hall, Great Queen Street, London, in a meeting held to constitute a Theistic Association in London on 20th July 1870. See Universal Religion for full speech.

Life, God, Truth, World

“Absolutely, what we need to do is that companies must just surrender 51%. … They have exploited the wealth of that country [South Africa] for far too long. It is time that the people are now beginning to benefit. Our people don't have money to buy those shares, and they will never have money to buy those shares. … Under president Mbeki they had 2/3 majority, they could have done anything they wanted. Till today they have not done anything. … because the ANC did not want to tamper with the economic structure and … property ownership … We are going to engage in a very persuasive, peaceful engagement with capital. … We are meeting captains of the industry. Some of them are beginning to respond to our memorandum. Some are saying, well these are doable proposals. … We'll not use that [civil disobedience] until that our people are pushed to the limit. … These people are prepared to give shares to the black elite who are politically connected. … why not give it to the workers themselves who are … making this company … what it is.”

Julius Malema (1981) South African political activist

In a television interview with Zeinab Badawi of BBC HARDtalk in December 2015, Watch: Julius Malema grilled by BBC journalist http://businesstech.co.za/news/government/106007/watch-julius-malema-grilled-by-bbc-journalist/, Staff writer, BusinessTech (2 December 2015)

Money, People, Peace, Time

“The end of the government being the good of mankind points out its great duties: it is above all things to provide for the security, the quiet, the happy enjoyment of life, liberty, and property.”

James Otis Jr. (1725–1783) Lawyer in colonial Massachusetts

Argument Against the Writs of Assistance (1761)

Life, Happiness

“In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity. What will be the course of this revolution? Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

(1847)

“The human groups have been selected for the effects of their habitual practices, effects of which the individuals were not and could not be aware. Customs are mostly group properties, beneficial only if they are common properties of its individual members but referring to reciprocal action.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

"The Origins and Effects of Our Morals: A Problem for Science", in The Essence of Hayek (1984)
1980s and later

“It was an act of madness. We killed each other and destroyed each other's property. It was wrong and both sides were to blame. We have had a difference, a quarrel. We engaged ourselves in a reckless and unprincipled fight.”

Robert Mugabe (1924–2019) former President of Zimbabwe

Remarks at a memorial for Joshua Nkomo (2 July 2000), referring to the Gukurahundi massacres. Quoted in Mugabe: Power, Plunder, and the Struggle for Zimbabwe's Future (2009) by Martin Meredith
2000s, 2000-2004

Fight, Madness

“Foundational to our exceptional nation’s sacred private property rights, a business must have freedom to locate where it wishes. In a free market, if a business makes a mistake (including a marketing mistake that perhaps Carrier executives made), threatening to move elsewhere claiming efficiency’s sake, then the market’s invisible hand punishes. Thankfully, that same hand rewards, based on good business decisions. But this time-tested truth assumes we’re operating on a level playing field. When government steps in arbitrarily with individual subsidies, favoring one business over others, it sets inconsistent, unfair, illogical precedent. Meanwhile, the invisible hand that best orchestrates a free people’s free enterprise system gets amputated. Then, special interests creep in and manipulate markets. Republicans oppose this, remember? Instead, we support competition on a level playing field, remember? Because we know special interest crony capitalism is one big fail.”

Sarah Palin (1964) American politician

2016, But… Wait… The Good Guys Won’t Win With More Crony Capitalism (December 2, 2016)

People, Truth, Business, Support

“Creating a system to protect industrial and intellectual property is a prerequisite for the transfer of technology and consequently the resurgence of national technologies.”

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh (1938) Jordanian businesspeople

June 18, 2007, National Seminar on Industrial Property and Technology Transfer in Arab States, Amman, Jordan.

“Once the first radical attack on private property has been launched, the proletariat will find itself forced to go ever further, to concentrate increasingly in the hands of the state all capital, all agriculture, all transport, all trade. All the foregoing measures are directed to this end; and they will become practicable and feasible, capable of producing their centralizing effects to precisely the degree that the proletariat, through its labor, multiplies the country’s productive forces.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

(1847)

Country

“The Communist … chooses some feature of an order where there is a potential resentment, or he may choose some feature about which people are simply soft-headed—that is to say, confused or uncertain. It may be the existence of rich men; it may be the right to acquire and use property privately; it may be the idea of discipline and regard in education; it may be some system of preferential advancement which produces envy in the less successful. His most common maneuver … is to vilify this as founded upon “prejudice.” The burden of his argument usually is that since these do not have perfectly rationalized bases, they have no right to exist.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“Life without prejudice,” p. 5.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

Men, People, Education, Idea

“The inconsistency of first explaining matter by atoms and then explaining atoms by matter was only slowly realised, and it is only comparatively recently that we have come to see that there is nothing paradoxical in the fact that an atom or an electron, which are not matter, may have properties different from those of matter, and must be allowed to do things that a material particle could not do.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932), Above is Beginning Quote of the Last Chapter: Relativity and Modern Theories of the Universe -->

“The methods of the Bernoullis and of Taylor, were held, at the time of their invention, to be most complete and exact. Several imperfections, however, belong to them. They do not apply to problems involving three or more properties; nor do they extend to cases involving differentials of a higher order than the first: for instance, they will not solve the problem, in which a curve is required, that with its radius of curvature and evolute shall contain the least area. Secondly, they do not extend to cases, in which the analytical expression contains, besides x, y, and their differentials, integral expressions; for instance, they will not solve the second case proposed in James Bernoulli's Programma if the Isoperimetrical condition be excluded; for then the arc s, an integral, since it =\int \! dx \sqrt(1+\frac{dy^2}{dx^2}), is not given. Thirdly, they do not extend to cases, in which the differential function, expressing the maximum should depend on a quantity, not given except under the form of a differential equation, and that not integrable; for instance, they will not solve the case of the curve of the quickest descent, in a resisting medium, the descending body being solicited by any forces whatever.”

Robert Woodhouse (1773–1827) English mathematician

A Treatise on Isoperimetrical Problems, and the Calculus of Variations (1810)

Problem, Time, Dependency

“For the West, the enemy was not "socialism" but capitalism. How to tame and subdue the polar bear, how to take over the talent, the science, the technology, how to buy out the human capital, how to acquire the intellectual property rights?”

Michel Chossudovsky (1946) Canadian economist

Source: The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order - Second Edition - (2003), Chapter 16, The "Thirdworldization" of the Russian Federation, p. 240

Science

“Under the rule of free competition, war between the producers of security entirely loses its justification. Why would they make war? To conquer consumers? But the consumers would not allow themselves to be conquered. They would be careful not to allow themselves to be protected by men who would unscrupulously attack the persons and property of their rivals. If some audacious conqueror tried to become dictator, they would immediately call to their aid all the free consumers menaced by this aggression, and they would treat him as he deserved. Just as war is the natural consequence of monopoly, peace is the natural consequence of liberty.”

Gustave de Molinari (1819–1912) Belgian political economist and classical liberal theorist

Source: The Production of Security (1849), p. 34-35

Men, War, Peace, Nature

“Kant has rightly observed that by the resolution of the concept of a thing we can find neither that it exists nor that it is the cause of something else, and accordingly that the concepts of being and causality are not analytical but can be derived only from experience. When however he later feels himself obliged to assume that the notion of causality originates in a pre-experiential property of the cognising subject and therefore stamps it a mere rule of time-series, by which, in experience, with each observation as cause any other could be connected as effect, then is the child thrown out with the bath. (Indeed, we must derive the relations of causality from experience; but we must not fail to correct and to complete our conception of these facts of experience by reflection.)”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

Causality, p. 214
Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

Feeling, Time

“…the great truth which lies at the foundation of all society—that every man has property in his fellow-man!”

George Fitzhugh (1806–1881) American activist

Source: Sociology For The South: Or The Failure Of A Free Society (1854), p. 69

Truth

“The objects of abstract Geometry possess in absolute precision properties which are only approximately realized in the corresponding objects of physical Geometry.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Squaring the Circle (1913), p. 5

“We must work assiduously and with determined boldness to remove from the body politic this cancerous disease of discrimination which is preventing our democratic and Christian health from being realized. Then and only then will we be able to bring into full realization the dream of our American democracy-a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few; a dream of a land where men do not argue that the color of a man’s skin determines the content of his character, where they recognize that the basic thing about a man is not his specific but his fundamentum; a dream of a place where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity; the dream of a country where every man will respect the dignity and worth of all human personality, and men will dare to live together as brothers-that is the dream.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, The Rising Tide of Racial Consciousnes (1960)

Men, Health, Disease, Dreams

“Only by abolishing private property in land and building cheap and hygienic dwellings can the housing problem be solved.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Collected Works, Vol. 24, p. 455–480.
Collected Works

Problem, Housing

“The Alabama Democratic convention [instructed] its delegates to walk out of the national convention if the party refused to adopt a platform pledging a federal slave code for the territories. Other lower-South Democratic organizations followed suit. In February, Jefferson Davis presented the substance of southern demands to the Senate in resolutions affirming that neither Congress nor a territorial legislature could impair the constitutional right of any citizen of the United States to take his slave property into the common territories.”

James M. McPherson (1936) American historian

James M. McPherson. Battle Cry of Freedom http://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/153655 (1988) p. 214 1980s

“A substance showing resonance between two or more valence-bond structures does not contain molecules with the configurations and properties usually associated with these structures.”

Linus Pauling (1901–1994) American scientist

The Nature of Chemical Bond (1939), Ch 14. A Summarizing Discussion of Resonance and Its Significance for Chemistry.

“Justice Antonin Scalia fundamentally changed the way the Supreme Court interpreted both statutes and the Constitution. In both contexts, his focus on text and its original public meaning often translated into more limited criminal prohibitions and broader constitutional protections for defendants. ‎As to statutes, Justice Scalia refocused the court’s attention on the text of the laws Congress enacted. Although he may not have succeeded in getting the court to forswear even looking at legislative history, he did persuade his colleagues to start — and very often end — the analysis with the text. In the criminal context, he limited terms like extortion and property to their common law core and found the residual clause of the Armed Career Criminal Act as unconstitutionally vague as “the phrase ‘fire-engine red, light pink, maroon, navy blue, or colors that otherwise involve shades of red.” When it came to interpreting the Constitution, he likewise put the text first and emphasized that the terms must be understood in light of their original public meaning. He believed that the words should be understood the way the framers used them. This did not mean that constitutional protections were frozen in time.”

Paul Clement (lawyer)

In Scalia, criminal defendants have lost a great defender: Paul Clement https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/02/19/scalia-funeral-constitution-defendants-jury-paul-clement-column/80575460/ (February 19, 2016)

Justice, Law, Color, Way

“Our agrarian revolution has been a process in which the landlord class owning the land is transformed into a class that has lost its land, while the peasants who once lost their land are transformed into small holders who have acquired land, and it will be such a process once again. In given conditions having and not having, acquiring and losing, are interconnected; there is identity of the two sides. Under socialism, private peasant ownership is transformed into the public ownership of socialist agriculture; this has already taken place in the Soviet Union, as it will take place everywhere else. There is a bridge leading from private property to public property, which in philosophy is called identity, or transformation into each other, or interpenetration.”

Mao Zedong book On Contradiction

On Contradiction (1937)
Original: (zh-CN) 我们实行过的土地革命，已经是并且还将是这样的过程，拥有土地的地主阶级转化为失掉土地的阶级，而曾经是失掉土地的农民却转化为取得土地的小私有者。有无、得失之间，因一定条件而互相联结，二者具有同一性。在社会主义条件之下，农民的私有制又将转化为社会主义农业的公有制，苏联已经这样做了，全世界将来也会这样做。私产和公产之间有一条由此达彼的桥梁，哲学上名之曰同一性，或互相转化、互相渗透。

“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”

Charles James Napier (1782–1853) Commander-in-Chief in British India

Napier, William. (1851) History of General Sir Charles Napier's Administration of Scinde, London: Chapman and Hall p. 35 http://books.google.com/books?id=d84BAAAAMAAJ&vq=suttee&dq=History%20of%20the%20Administration%20of%20Scinde&pg=PA35#v=onepage&q&f=false at books.google.com. Retrieved 11 October 2013

Women, Men

“Influence must ever be in proportion to property; and it is right it should.”

James Boswell (1740–1795) Scottish lawyer, diarist and author

Quoting Samuel Johnson (18 August 1773)
The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1785)

“Trying to understand the brain's abilities leads to philosophical difliculties. Penrose (1994) argues that the task is sterile and that science, including neural networks, has not yet advanced to the stage where it can explain conscious thought. At the other extreme there are philosophers such as Fodor (1975) who believed that thought has language-like properties and can be analysed in the same logical way as one can anlayse the structure of language.”

Igor Aleksander (1937) scientist

Source: An introduction to neural computing (1990), p. 242

Way, Understanding, Science

“The increasing speed of technological advancement and economic integration in recent years has highlighted the importance of intellectual property and put great stress on the ability of established national and international systems that administer IP rights to effectively serve the global community.”

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh (1938) Jordanian businesspeople

August 11, 2003, at the Jordan IP Week Conference, Amman, Jordan.

Communication, Speed

“A lawyer's dream of heaven: every man reclaimed his own property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Further Extracts from the Note-Books of Samuel Butler http://books.google.pt/books?id=zltaAAAAMAAJ&q=%22A+lawyer's+dream+of+heaven:%22&dq=%22A+lawyer's+dream+of+heaven:%22&hl=pt-PT&sa=X&ei=_LPRUvmtGa_b7AbdjoCADQ&ved=0CFgQ6AEwBjgK, compiled and edited by ‎A.T. Bartholomew (1934), p. 27

Dreams

“Our mental environment is a common-property resource like the air or the water. We need to protect ourselves from unwanted incursions into it, much the same way we lobbied for nonsmoking areas ten years ago.”

Kalle Lasn (1942) Estonian-Canadian film maker, author, magazine editor and activist

Cultural Jam (2000)

Way, Water

“Almost all of the material phenomena which occur under terrestrial conditions are recognized as quantum mechanical consequences of the electrical attraction between electrons and nuclei and of the gravitational attraction between massive objects. We should be able, therefore, to express all the relevant magnitudes which characterize the properties of matter in terms of the following six magnitudes: M, m, e, c, G, and h; M is the mass of the proton, m and e are the mass and electrical charge of the electron, c is the light velocity, G is Newton's gravitational constant, and—most importantly—h is the quantum of action …”

Victor Frederick Weisskopf (1908–2002) Austrian-born American theoretical physicist

[Of Atoms, Mountains, and Stars: A Study in Qualitative Physics, Victor F. Weisskopf, Science, 187, 4177, 21 February 1975, 605–612, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1739660]

Light

“The area of scientific interest is… the study of the objectives, functions, structure, properties, behaviour, performance and effects of informative communication processes and information systems. To this study the name "information science" can legitimately be attached.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Information Systems (1973), p. 330; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

Communication, Study, Science

“[The newspapers] are talking of nationalism as if it were the property of an individual or as if it were confined to one group only. Nationalism is the property of all. Nobody can take possession of it just as a glittering word which attracts the hearts of stupid people.”

Abd al-Karim Qasim (1914–1963) Prime Minister of Iraq

The historical extempore speech at the Reserve Officers' College (1959)

People, Stupidity, Heart

“suppose the kind-hearted man decided to ask the mayor and city council to force the man with two cars to give one to his pedestrian neighbor. Does that make it any more legitimate? Obviously, this makes it even worse because if the mayor and city council do it in the name of the law, the man who has lost his car has not only lost the rights to his property, but (since it is the "law") he has lost all right to appeal for help in protecting his property. The American Founders recognized that the moment the government is authorized to start leveling the material possessions of the rich in order to have an "equal distribution of goods," the government thereafter has the power to deprive any of the people of their "equal" rights to enjoy their lives, liberties, and property.”

W. Cleon Skousen (1913–2006) ex FBI agent, conservative United States author and faith-based political theorist

The 5,000 Year Leap (1981)

People, Law, Cars, Help

“The reason is not to glorify "bit chasing"; a more fundamental issue is at stake here: Numerical subroutines should deliver results that satisfy simple, useful mathematical laws whenever possible. […] Without any underlying symmetry properties, the job of proving interesting results becomes extremely unpleasant. The enjoyment of one's tools is an essential ingredient of successful work.”

Donald Ervin Knuth book The Art of Computer Programming

Vol. II, Seminumerical Algorithms, Section 4.2.2 part A, final paragraph [Italics in source]
The Art of Computer Programming (1968–2011)

Law, Mathematics, Success

“I believe that any form of writing exercise is good for you. I also believe that any form of tuition which helps develop your awareness of the different properties, styles, and effects of writing is good for you. It helps you become a better reader, more sensitive to nuance, and a better writer, more sensitive to audience. Texting language is no different from other innovative forms of written expression that have emerged in the past. It is a type of language whose communicative strengths and weaknesses need to be appreciated.”

David Crystal (1941) British linguist and writer

David Crystal, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, OUP Oxford, 2009. p. 128

Exercises, Communication, Past, Help

“The inhabitants of the ceded territory shall be incorporated in the Union of the United States, and admitted as soon as possible, according to the principles of the Federal constitution, to the enjoyment of all the rights, advantages, and immunities, of citizens of the United States; and, in the mean time, they shall be maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty, property, and the religion which they profess.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Louisiana Treaty of Cession, Art. III (30 April 1803)
1800s, First Presidential Administration (1801–1805)

Religion, Time

“An analysis of social relations in 2 parts: the properties of 2-person relations, and an extension of the chief concepts to the complex relations of larger groups. Beginning with the assumption that most social interactions must be reinforced to be repeated, the authors analyze 2-person matrices designed to express all the possible interactions and their outcomes in terms of rewards and costs to the participants. Also investigated are: the exogenous and endogenous determinants of rewards and costs, interactive interference and facilitation, formation and evaluation of the 2-person relation, power and dependence, norms and roles, tasks, and nonvoluntary relations. The chapters on larger groups take up interdependence, status, conformity, and group goals. 300-item bibliog”

John Thibaut (1917–1986) American social psychologist

Abstract
The social psychology of groups. 1959

Parting, Dependency, Personality

“Now if you ask me, in conclusion, “Well, what, then should properly be done?” Obviously war, but I mean in regard to this issue I would say: Any way possible permission should be refused and if they go ahead and build it, the government should bomb it out of existence, evacuating it first, with no compensation to any of the property owners involved in this monstrosity.”

Leonard Peikoff (1933) Canadian-American philosopher

What do you think of the plan for a mosque in New York City near Ground Zero? (28 June 2010)
2010s

War, Way

“Europe resolved a great problem – the problem of the Zionist danger. The Zionists, who constituted a strong political party in Europe, caused much disorder there. Since they had a lot of property and controlled an empire of propaganda, they made the European governments helpless. What Hitler and the German Nazis did to the Jews of Europe at that time was partly due to these circumstances with the Jews. They wanted to expel the Zionists from Europe because they always were a pain in the neck for the governments there. This is how this calamity fell upon the Muslims, especially the Palestinians, and you all know this history, more or less. […]The first goal was to save Europe from the evil of Zionism, and in this, they have been relatively successful.”

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1934–2017) Iranian politician, Shi'a cleric and Writer

Excerpts from a Friday sermon on International Jerusalem Day http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/1575.htm (October 5, 2007) 2007

Pain, History, Problem, Strong

“Every stable system has the property that if displaced from a state of equilibrium and released, the subsequent movement is so matched to the initial displacement that the system is brought back to the state of equilibrium. A variety of disturbances will therefore evoke a variety of matched reactions.”

W. Ross Ashby (1903–1972) British psychiatrist

Source: Design for a Brain: The Origin of Adaptive Behavior (1952), p.54

“The Sultan requested the wise men to supply some rules and regulations for grinding down the Hindus, and for depriving them of that wealth and property which fosters disaffection and rebellion. … The people were brought to such a state of obedience that one revenue officer would string twenty khiits, mukaddims, or chaudharis together by the neck, and enforce payment by blows. No Hindu could hold up his head, and in their houses no sign of gold or silver, tonkas or jitals, or of any superfluity was to be seen. These things, which nourish insubordination and rebellion, were no longer to be found. Driven by destitution, the wives of the khuls and mukaddims went and served for hire in the houses of the Musulmans…. The Hindu was to be so reduced as to be left un- able to keep a horse to ride on, to carry arms, to wear fine clothes, or to enjoy any of the luxuries of life. …. I have, therefore, taken my measures, and have made my subjects obedient, so that at my command they are ready to creep into holes like mice. Now you tell me that it is all in accordance with law that the Hindus should be reduced to the most abject obedience. I am an unlettered man, but I have seen a great deal; be assured then that the Hindus will never become submissive and obedient till they are reduced to poverty. I have, therefore, given orders that just sufficient shall be left to them from year to year, of corn, milk, and curds, but that they shall not be allowed to accumulate hoards and property.”

Alauddin Khalji (1266–1316) Ruler of the Khalji dynasty

Tarikh-i Firoz Shahi, of Ziauddin Barani in Elliot and Dowson, Vol. III : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. p. 182 ff.
Quotes from Muslim medieval histories

Life, Men, People, Law

“By the word "liberty" they meant liberty for property, not liberty for persons.”

Lewis H. Lapham (1935) American journalist

Source: Money And Class In America (1989), Chapter 2, Protocols of Wealth, p. 33

Personality

“I hold in fact
(1) That small portions of space are in fact of a nature analogous to little hills on a surface which is on the average flat; namely, that the ordinary laws of geometry are not valid in them.
(2) That this property of being curved or distorted is continually being passed on from one portion of space to another after the manner of a wave.
(3) That this variation of the curvature of space is what really happens in that phenomenon which we call the motion of matter, whether ponderable or etherial.
(4) That in the physical world nothing else takes place but this variation, subject possibly to the law of continuity.”

William Kingdon Clifford On the Space-Theory of Matter

Abstract
On the Space-Theory of Matter (read Feb 21, 1870)

World, Law, Nature

“No less a philosopher than Chief Justice Burger was outraged by Ellsberg's publication of classified documents. They belonged to the Government, Burger reasoned, and Ellsberg had no more right to give them to the people than he would have to filch another man's property off a taxicab seat.
The Government, of course, commonly leaks classified documents when it deems publication convenient to manipulate public opinion to its advantage. Only the Government, it seems, has a legal right to manipulate opinion with hot documents.”

Russell Baker (1925–2019) writer and satirst from the United States

"Moods of Washington" (p.38)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

People, Justice

“Carnap calls such concepts as point, straight line, etc., which are given by implicit definitions, improper concepts. Their peculiarity rests on the fact that they do not characterize a thing by its properties, but by its relation to other things. Consider for example the concept of the last car of a train. Whether or not a particular car falls under this description does not depend on its properties but on its position relative to other cars. We could therefore speak of relative concepts, but would have to extend the meaning of this term to apply not only to relations but also to the elements of the relations.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

Cars, Dependency, Training

“That which is impossible has a permanent and constant property, which is not the result if some agent, and cannot in any way change, and consequently we do not ascribe to God the power of doing what is impossible.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.15

God, Way, Change

“That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot by any compact deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

George Mason (1725–1792) American delegate from Virginia to the U.S. Constitutional Convention

Article 1
Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776)

Life, Men, Happiness, Nature

“Muhammad Kasim fixed a tax upon all the subjects, according to the laws of the Prophet. Those who embraced the Muhammadan faith were exempted from slavery, the tribute, and the poll-tax, and from those who did not change their creed a tax was exacted according to three grades. The first grade was of great men, and each of these was to pay silver, equal to forty-eight dirams in weight, the second grade twenty-four dirams, and the lowest grade twelve dirams. It was ordered that all who should become Musulmans at once should be exempted from the payment, but those who were desirous of their old persuasion must pay the tribute and poll-tax. Some showed an inclination to abide by their creed, and some having resolved upon paying tribute, held by the faith of their forefathers, but their lands and property were not taken from them…”

Muhammad bin Qasim (695–715) Umayyad general

The Chach Nama, in: Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, Volume I, p. 176-182.
Quotes from The Chach Nama

Men, Faith, Law, Change

“Biological communities are systems of interacting components and thus display characteristic properties of systems, such as mutual interdependence, self-regulation, adaptation to disturbances, approach to states of equilibrium, etc.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

As cited in: Debora Hammond (2005). "Philosophical and Ethical Foundations of Systems Thinking", in: tripleC 3(2): pp. 20–27.
1950s, Problems of Life (1952, 1960)

Communication

“Income from property is not the reward of waiting, it is the reward of employing a good stockbroker.”

Joan Robinson (1903–1983) English economist

Source: Contributions to Modern Economics (1978), Chapter 16, The Theory of Value Reconsidered, p. 188

Waiting

“Privilege is basically a form of property, and as John Locke pointed out, property is what makes a civilization rather than a Libyan war zone of Hobbesian anarchy. The world is a better place when people can work constructively to earn privileges, individual and collective, and pass some of them on to their heirs.”

Steve Sailer (1958) American journalist and movie critic

Checking Iron Age Barbarian Prejudice http://takimag.com/article/checking_iron_age_barbarian_prejudice_steve_sailer/print#ixzz4A7r77jkG, Taki's Magazine, April 22, 2015

War, People, World

“The aim of linguistics is to go beyond the study of individual languages to determine what the universal properties of language are, and to establish a ‘universal grammar’ that would account for the range of linguistic variation that is humanly possible.”

David Crystal (1941) British linguist and writer

Source: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 1987, p. 84

Study, Universe

“By science I mean an assemblage of transcendental propositions discoverable by human reason, and reducible to first principles, axioms, or maxims, from which they may all be derived in a regular succession; and there are consequently as many sciences as there are general objects of our intellectual powers: when man first exerts those powers, his objects are himself and the rest of nature; himself he perceives to be composed of body and mind… and in the leisure… his intellect is directed to nature at large, to the substance of natural bodies, to their several properties, and to their quantity… and… arrives at the demonstration of a first intelligent cause; whence his collected wisdom, being arranged in the form of science, chiefly consists of physiology and medicine, metaphysicks and logick, ethicks and jurisprudence, natural philosophy and mathematicks; from which the religion of nature (since revealed religion must be referred to history, as alone affording evidence of it) has in all ages and in all nations been the sublime and consoling result.”

William Jones (1746–1794) Anglo-Welsh philologist and scholar of ancient India

p, 125
"On the Philosophy of the Asiatics" (1794)

Wisdom, Age, Religion, History

“By this I refer to the fact that at the same time several people may each possess some portion of the rights to use the land. A may possess the right to grow wheat on it. B may possess the right to walk across it. C may possess the right to dump ashes and smoke on it. D may possess the right to fly an airplane over it. E may have the right to subject it to vibrations consequent to the use of some neighboring equipment. And each of these rights may be transferable. In sum, private property rights to various partitioned uses of land are "owned" by different persons.”

Armen Alchian (1914–2013) American economist

Source: Economic Forces at Work, 1977, p. 132-133

People, Time, Personality, Flying

“In a class system, the social hierarchy is based primarily upon differences in monetary wealth and income. Social classes are not sharply marked off from each other, nor are they demarcated by tangible boundaries. Unlike estates, they have no legal standing, individuals of all classes being in principle equal before the law. Consequently, there are no legal restraints on the movement of individuals and families from one class to another… Unlike caste, social classes are not organized, closed groups. Rather, they are aggregates of persons with similar amounts of wealth and property, and similar sources of income.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Class and society (1959), p. 15; as cited in: Ronald J. Samuda (1998) Psychological Testing of American Minorities: Issues and Consequences. p. 47.

Family, Law, Personality, Wealth

“I want to stress that rationality is not a property of the individual alone, although it is usually presented that way. Rather, it gathers not only its force but also its very meaning from the social context in which it is embedded.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

1970s-1980s, "Rationality of Self and Others in an Economic System", 1986

Way

“Ours, according to Leibnitz, is the best of all possible worlds, and the laws of nature can therefore be described in terms of extremal principles. Thus, arising from corresponding variational problems, the differential equations of mechanics have invariance properties relative to certain groups of coordinate transformations.”

Carl Ludwig Siegel (1896–1981) German mathematician

[Lectures on Celestial Mechanics, https://books.google.com/books?id=mZtrCQAAQBAJ&pg=PA1] (p. 1)

World, Law, Nature, Problem

“Death is not extinction. Neither the soul nor the body is extinguished or put out of existence. The body weighs just as much as before, the only properties it loses at the moment of death are potential properties. So also all we can assert concerning the vital principle is that it no longer animates that material organism: we cannot safely make further assertion regarding it, or maintain its activity or inactivity without further information.”

Oliver Lodge (1851–1940) British physicist

Raymond, pp. 296–297 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t80k3mq4s;view=1up;seq=338 Raymond, or Life and Death (1916)

Death, Soul, Animals

“The sole "property" of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside the mind.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908)

Reality

“Shipping board. The form of the organization of the Shipping Board was based originally on its functions as a semi judicial body in regulation of rates. During the war it was loaded with enormous administrative duties. It has been demonstrated time and again that this form of organization results in indecision, division of opinion and administrative functions, which make a wholly inadequate foundation for the conduct of a great business enterprise. The first principle in securing the objective set out by Congress in building up the American merchant marine upon the great trade routes and subsequently disposing of it into private operation can not proceed with effectiveness until the entire functions of the board are reorganized. The immediate requirement is to transfer into the Emergency Fleet, Corporation the whole responsibility of operation of the fleet and other property, leaving to the Shipping Board solely the duty of determining certain major policies which require deliberative action.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

War, Business, Time, Indecision

“Let us imagine that from any given point the system of shortest lines going out from it is constructed; the position of an arbitrary point may then be determined by the initial direction of the geodesic in which it lies, and by its distance measured along that line from the origin. It can therefore be expressed in terms of the ratios dx0 of the quantities dx in this geodesic, and of the length s of this line. …the square of the line-element is \sum (dx)^2 for infinitesimal values of the x, but the term of next order in it is equal to a homogeneous function of the second order… an infinitesimal, therefore, of the fourth order; so that we obtain a finite quantity on dividing this by the square of the infinitesimal triangle, whose vertices are (0,0,0,…), (x1, x2, x3,…), (dx1, dx2, dx3,…). This quantity retains the same value so long as… the two geodesics from 0 to x and from 0 to dx remain in the same surface-element; it depends therefore only on place and direction. It is obviously zero when the manifold represented is flat, i. e., when the squared line-element is reducible to \sum (dx)^2, and may therefore be regarded as the measure of the deviation of the manifoldness from flatness at the given point in the given surface-direction. Multiplied by -¾ it becomes equal to the quantity which Privy Councillor Gauss has called the total curvature of a surface. …The measure-relations of a manifoldness in which the line-element is the square root of a quadric differential may be expressed in a manner wholly independent of the choice of independent variables. A method entirely similar may for this purpose be applied also to the manifoldness in which the line-element has a less simple expression, e. g., the fourth root of a quartic differential. In this case the line-element, generally speaking, is no longer reducible to the form of the square root of a sum of squares, and therefore the deviation from flatness in the squared line-element is an infinitesimal of the second order, while in those manifoldnesses it was of the fourth order. This property of the last-named continua may thus be called flatness of the smallest parts. The most important property of these continua for our present purpose, for whose sake alone they are here investigated, is that the relations of the twofold ones may be geometrically represented by surfaces, and of the morefold ones may be reduced to those of the surfaces included in them…”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

On the Hypotheses which lie at the Bases of Geometry (1873)

Imagination, Parting, Dependency

“We must not be frighted when a matter of property comes before us by saying it belongs to the Parliament; we must exert the Queen's jurisdiction.”

John Holt (Lord Chief Justice) (1642–1710) English lawyer and Lord Chief Justice of England

2 Raym. Rep. 938.
Ashby v. White (1703)

“The rights to life, liberty and property were not meant to be subject to the vagaries of majority rule.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“Life, Liberty, and Property,” http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=497 WorldNetDaily.com and Taki’s Magazine, May 15, 2009. 2000s, 2009

Life

“The organization of economic activity through voluntary exchange presumes that we have provided, through government, for the maintenance of law and order to prevent coercion of one individual by another, the enforcement of contracts voluntarily entered into, the definition of the meaning of property rights, the interpretation and enforcement of such rights, and the provision of a monetary framework.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

Source: (1962), Ch. 2 The Role of Government in a Free Society, p. 27

Law

“We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the United Buddhist Church. This is a role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolutions impossible but refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that comes from the immense profits of overseas investments. I'm convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam (1967)

People, Pleasure, World, Family

“If a Tory does not believe that private property is one of the main bulwarks of individual freedom, then he had better become a socialist and have done with it.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Article for Daily Telegraph ("My Kind of Tory Party") (30 January 1975) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=102600 Shadow Secretary for Environment

Freedom

“The Escalation programmers come from a completely different background, and the codebase is all STL this, boost that, fill-up-the-property list, dispatch the event, and delegate that. I had been harboring some suspicions that our big codebases might benefit from the application of some more of the various “modern” C++ design patterns, despite seeing other large game codebases suffer under them. I have since recanted that suspicion.”

John D. Carmack (1970) American computer programmer, engineer, and businessman

Quoted in "http://www.bethblog.com/" http://www.bethblog.com/2010/10/29/john-carmack-discusses-rage-on-iphoneipadipod-touch/

Game, Suffering

“I had not thought of this regular decrease of gravity, namely that it is as the inverse square of the distance; this is a new and highly remarkable property of gravity.”

Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) Dutch mathematician and natural philosopher

(1691) quoted in Popular Astronomy, Vol. 56 (1948), pp. 189–190.

“Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it's supposed to nurture.”

Alex Kozinski (1950) American judge

Dissenting in the White v. Samsung Elec. Am., Inc., 989 F.2d 1512 (9th Cir. 1993) ruling. http://notabug.com/kozinski/whitedissent.

Science

“In conditions of private property … “life-activity” stands in the service of property instead of property standing the service of free life-activity.”

Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) German philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist

"The Foundations of Historical Materialism," Studies in Critical Philosophy (1972), p. 32

Life

“The slave is a man, "the image of God," but "a little lower than the angels;" possessing a soul, eternal and indestructible; capable of endless happiness, or immeasurable woe; a creature of hopes and fears, of affections and passions, of joys and sorrows, and he is endowed with those mysterious powers by which man soars above the things of time and sense, and grasps, with undying tenacity, the elevating and sublimely glorious idea of a God. It is such a being that is smitten and blasted. The first work of slavery is to mar and deface those characteristics of its victims which distinguish men from things, and persons from property. Its first aim is to destroy all sense of high moral and religious responsibility. It reduces man to a mere machine. It cuts him off from his Maker, it hides from him the laws of God, and leaves him to grope his way from time to eternity in the dark, under the arbitrary and despotic control of a frail, depraved, and sinful fellow-man. As the serpent-charmer of India is compelled to extract the deadly teeth of his venomous prey before he is able to handle him with impunity, so the slaveholder must strike down the conscience of the slave before he can obtain the entire mastery over his victim.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

The Nature of Slavery. Extract from a Lecture on Slavery, at Rochester, December 1, 1850
1850s, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)

Men, God, Happiness, Fear

“I often wondered what I would do if I were ever traded because it happened many, many times, and it was "part of the game." And then suddenly it happened to me. I was leaving probably one of the greatest organizations in the world to at that time what was probably the least liked, and by God, this is America, and I'm a human being. I'm not a piece of property. I'm not a consignment of goods.”

Curt Flood (1938–1997) baseball player

In an interview from Ken Burns' 1994 documentary Baseball

God, World, Game, Time

“The struggle for power in our day lies not between Crown and people, or between a caste of nobles and a bourgeoisie, but between the classes who have property and the classes who have none.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Quarterly Review, 112, 1862, p. 542
1860s

People

“When the principle of hereditary dominion shall be extinguished in all the institutions of France; when government shall no longer be considered as property transmissible from sire to son, but as a trust committed for a limited time, and then to return to the people whence it came; as a burdensome duty to be discharged, and not as a reward to be abused; when a claim, any claim, to political power by inheritance shall, in the estimation of the whole French people, be held as it now is by the whole people of the North American Union — then will be the time for contemplating the character of Lafayette, not merely in the events of his life, but in the full development of his intellectual conceptions, of his fervent aspirations, of the labors and perils and sacrifices of his long and eventful career upon earth; and thenceforward, till the hour when the trump of the Archangel shall sound to announce that Time shall be no more, the name of Lafayette shall stand enrolled upon the annals of our race, high on the list of the pure and disinterested benefactors of mankind.”

John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) American politician, 6th president of the United States (in office from 1825 to 1829)

Oration on Lafayette (1834)

Life, People, Time

“The analytical equations, unknown to the ancient geometers, which Descartes was the first to introduce into the study of curves and surfaces, are not restricted to the properties of figures, and to those properties which are the object of rational mechanics; they extend to all general phenomena. There cannot be a language more universal and more simple, more free from errors and from obscurities, that is to say more worthy to express the invariable relations of natural things.
Considered from this point of view, mathematical analysis is as extensive as nature itself; it defines all perceptible relations, measures times, spaces, forces, temperatures; this difficult science is formed slowly, but it preserves every principle which it has once acquired; it grows and strengthens itself incessantly in the midst of the many variations and errors of the human mind.
Its chief attribute is clearness; it has no marks to express confused notions. It brings together phenomena the most diverse, and discovers the hidden analogies which unite them.”

Joseph Fourier book The Analytical Theory of Heat

Preliminary Discourse, p.7 Note: often quoted as Mathematics [or mathematical analysis] compares the most diverse phenomena and discovers the secret analogies that unite them.
The Analytical Theory of Heat (1878)

Error, Mathematics, Nature, Study

“… it is precisely because it is not a democracy that China will likely be so successful…What is of vital importance for economic success is economic freedom, meaning the protection of private property, the rule of law, and minimal regulation and taxation, not the right to vote.”

Peter D. Schiff (1963) American entrepreneur, economist and author

Quotes from Crash Proof (2006)

Law, Democracy, Freedom, Success

“There comes up another difficulty which more nearly concerns our vanity: namely, the impossibility of our conceiving this property [the faculty of feeling] as a dependence or attribute of matter.”

Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751) French physician and philosopher

Source: The Natural History of the Soul (1745), Ch. VI Concerning the Sensitive Faculty of Matter

Feeling, Dependency

“Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution and the one which, united with that of personal liberty, has contributed more to the growth of civilization than any other institution established by the human race.”

William Howard Taft (1857–1930) American politician, 27th President of the United States (in office from 1909 to 1913)

Popular Government: Its Essence, Its Permanence and Its Perils, chapter 4, p.90 (1913).

Personality

“Such 'habituation´is just a property of the way brains work; our senses, and those of grackles, notice novelty and change, not steady states. The female preference did not evolve: it just is that way.”

Matt Ridley (1958) economist

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 5

Way, Sense, Change

“One of the many importants ideas introduced by Minkowski into the study of convex bodies was that of gauge function. Roughly, the gauge function is the equation of a convex body. Minkowski showed that the gauge function could be defined in a purely geometric way and that it must have certain properties analogous to those possessed by the distance of a point from the origin. He also showed that conversely given any function possessing these properties, there exists a convex body with the given function as its gauge function.”

Carl Ludwig Siegel (1896–1981) German mathematician

[Lectures on the Geometry of Numbers, https://books.google.com/books?id=dyH4CAAAQBAJ&pg=PA6] (p. 6)

Way, Idea, Gauge, Study

“The Protestant churches generally hold that the elements of the sacrament are flesh and blood only in a tropical sense; they nourish our souls as meat and the juice of it would our bodies. But the Catholics maintain that they are literally just that; although they possess all the sensible qualities of wafer-cakes and diluted wine. But we can have no conception of wine except what may enter into a belief, either —
# That this, that, or the other, is wine; or,
# That wine possesses certain properties.
Such beliefs are nothing but self-notifications that we should, upon occasion, act in regard to such things as we believe to be wine according to the qualities which we believe wine to possess. The occasion of such action would be some sensible perception, the motive of it to produce some sensible result. Thus our action has exclusive reference to what affects the senses, our habit has the same bearing as our action, our belief the same as our habit, our conception the same as our belief; and we can consequently mean nothing by wine but what has certain effects, direct or indirect, upon our senses; and to talk of something as having all the sensible characters of wine, yet being in reality blood, is senseless jargon. Now, it is not my object to pursue the theological question; and having used it as a logical example I drop it, without caring to anticipate the theologian's reply. I only desire to point out how impossible it is that we should have an idea in our minds which relates to anything but conceived sensible effects of things. Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects; and if we fancy that we have any other we deceive ourselves, and mistake a mere sensation accompanying the thought for a part of the thought itself. It is absurd to say that thought has any meaning unrelated to its only function. It is foolish for Catholics and Protestants to fancy themselves in disagreement about the elements of the sacrament, if they agree in regard to all their sensible effects, here or hereafter.
It appears, then, that the rule for attaining the third grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows: Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

The final sentence here is an expression of what became known as the Pragmatic maxim, first published in "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" in Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12 (January 1878), p. 286

Soul, Motivation, Idea, Question

“All hereditary Government is in its nature tyranny. An heritable crown, or an heritable throne, or by what other fanciful name such things may be called, have no other significant explanation than that mankind are heritable property. To inherit a Government, is to inherit the people, as if they were flocks and herds.”

Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) English theologian, chemist, educator, and political theorist

The Rights of Man (1791)

People, Nature

“Let me give you my vision. A man's right to work as he will to spend what he earns to own property to have the State as servant and not as master these are the British inheritance. They are the essence of a free economy. And on that freedom all our other freedoms depend.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to the Conservative Party Conference (10 October 1975) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/102777 Leader of the Opposition

Freedom, Dependency

“Now there's a little story to that. Chief Justice Taney, in the Dred Scott decision—which said that the Missouri Compromise restriction of slavery in 1820 and any other one, was unconstitutional—said that there was no power in the Congress to forbid slavery in the territories. And he added as a kind of obiter dictum that the only power of Congress over slavery in the territories was the power coupled with the duty of protecting the owner and his rights. Now the seven states of the Deep South interpreted that to mean that the police power of the federal government had to guarantee the integrity of the property of any slave owner going into any United States territory.”

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

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Right of Secession Is Not the Right of Revolution

Justice, Decision

“But if some mind very different from ours were to look upon some property of some curved line as we do on the evenness of a straight line, he would not recognize as such the evenness of a straight line; nor would he arrange the elements of his geometry according to that very different system, and would investigate quite other relationships as I have suggested in my notes.
We fashion our geometry on the properties of a straight line because that seems to us to be the simplest of all. But really all lines that are continuous and of a uniform nature are just as simple as one another. Another kind of mind which might form an equally clear mental perception of some property of any one of these curves, as we do of the congruence of a straight line, might believe these curves to be the simplest of all, and from that property of these curves build up the elements of a very different geometry, referring all other curves to that one, just as we compare them to a straight line. Indeed, these minds, if they noticed and formed an extremely clear perception of some property of, say, the parabola, would not seek, as our geometers do, to rectify the parabola, they would endeavor, if one may coin the expression, to parabolify the straight line.”

Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711–1787) Croat-Italian physicist

"Boscovich's mathematics", an article by J. F. Scott, in the book Roger Joseph Boscovich (1961) edited by Lancelot Law Whyte.
"Transient pressure analysis in composite reservoirs" (1982) by Raymond W. K. Tang and William E. Brigham.
"Non-Newtonian Calculus" (1972) by Michael Grossman and Robert Katz.

Fashion, Nature

“Government exists but to maintain special privilege and property rights; it coerces man into submission and therefore robs him of dignity, self-respect, and life.”

Emma Goldman (1868–1940) anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and speeches

A New Declaration of Independence (1909)

Life

“I beheld the working of all the blessed Trinity: in which beholding I saw and understood these three properties: the property of the Fatherhood, the property of the Motherhood, and the property of the Lordhood, in one God.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

Summations, Chapter 58

God

Quotes about property page 8

Quotes about property
page 8