Property

“ With this power of creation, and this passion for independence, property has reached an ideal perfection. It is felt and treated as the national life-blood. The laws are framed to give property the securest possible basis, and the provisions to lock and transmit it have exercised the cunningest heads in a profession which never admits a fool. ”

“ In other words, property consists in Values, in a purchasing-power, and not in possession, or in appropriation, or in the esteem in which a man holds anything he has as long as it is his own.
The test of property is a sale; that which will bring something when exposed for exchange is property; that which will bring nothing, either never was, or has now ceased to be, distinctively property. ”

“ You see, after all, few rich men own their property. The property owns them. ”

“ Well, sir, in writing against property, have I done more than quote the language of history? I have said to modern society,—the daughter and heiress of all preceding societies,—Age guod agis: complete the task which for six thousand years you have been executing under the inspiration and by the command of God; hasten to finish your journey; turn neither to the right nor the left, but follow the road which lies before you. You seek reason, law, unity, and discipline ”

“ Property is the suicide of society. Possession is a right; property is against right. Suppress property while maintaining possession, and, by this simple modification of the principle, you will revolutionize law, government, economy, and institutions; you will drive evil from the face of the earth.
II. All having an equal right of occupancy, possession varies with the number of possessors; property cannot establish itself.
III. The effect of labor being the same for all, property is lost in the common prosperity. ”

“ To say that property is the daughter of labor, and then to give labor material on which to exercise itself, is, if I am not mistaken, to reason in a circle. Contradictions will result from it.
“A piece of land of a certain size produces food enough to supply a man for one day. If the possessor, through his labor, discovers some method of making it produce enough for two days, he doubles its value. This new value is his work, his creation: it is taken from nobody; it is his property.” ”

“ It is property that has descended to him through ancestors for two centuries; property that is historically connected with his name—on which he was born, on which he has lived, and on which he has hoped to die; property, in a word, that is associated with all the higher feelings of humanity. ”

“ The same is the case with property in buildings, clothes, wares; with property in the land; with property in money. Every imaginary property calls forth in me a non-corresponding want which cannot always be gratified, and deprives me of the possibility of acquiring for my true and sure property—my own body—that information, that skill, those habits, improvements, which I might have acquired. ”

“ Why should property, contrary to the interests of the proprietor, be exempt from sale, receive instruction, give testimony in court, hold estate, preserve family ties, be loved as the owner loves himself, in fine, enjoy all or any of the "inalienable rights" of man? ”

“ I have accomplished my task; property is conquered, never again to arise. Wherever this work is read and discussed, there will be deposited the germ of death to property; there, sooner or later, privilege and servitude will disappear, and the despotism of will will give place to the reign of reason. ”

“ Now, property is but the creature of law; and that is to say, in those of our States which have no common law, of statute. Jurists and communists are alike agreed on this. "Property is robbery," said Proudhon; property is but the creature of law, all English jurists admit. ”

“ SECOND PROPOSITION. Property is Impossible, because, wherever it exists, Production costs more than it is worth. THIRD PROPOSITION. Property is Impossible, because, with a given Capital, Production is proportional to Labor, not to Property. FOURTH PROPOSITION. Property is Impossible, because it is Homicide. FIFTH PROPOSITION. Property is Impossible, because, if it exists, Society devours itself. ”

“ For property which can be regarded as a condition of the performance of function, like the tools of the craftsman, or the holding of the peasant, or the personal possessions which contribute to a life of health and efficiency, forms an insignificant proportion, as far as its value is concerned, of the property rights existing at present. ”

“ Property is one of those basic institutions, new theories concerning which cannot be presented too soon; for it must not be forgotten, and the publicist and statesman must know, that on the answer to the question whether property is the principle or the result of social order, whether it is to be considered as a cause or an effect, depends all morality, and, consequently, all the authority of human institutions. ”

“ There is such a parade of this, that all our constitutions declare that property shall never be taken without due form of law; and to read one of them, you would think the property of the citizen is held quite as sacred as his person. ”

“ The laws of property have never yet conformed to the principles on which the justification of private property rests. They have made property of things which never ought to be property, and absolute property where only a qualified property ought to exist. ”

“ The right of property is that which belongs to every citizen to enjoy, and to dispose at his pleasure of his goods, income, and of the fruits of his labor and his skill.
17. No kind of labor, tillage, or commerce can be forbidden to the skill of the citizens.
18. Every man can contract his services and his time, but he cannot sell himself nor be sold: his person is not an alienable property. The law knows of no such thing as the status of servant; there can exist only a contract for services and compensation between the man who works and the one who employs him. ”

“ Toullier: "Property is a right, a legal power; possession is a fact." The tenant, the farmer, the commandite, the usufructuary, are possessors; the owner who lets and lends for use, the heir who is to come into possession on the death of a usufructuary, are proprietors. If I may venture the comparison: a lover is a possessor, a husband is a proprietor. ”

“ But property is also the right to exchange, to transfer, and to sell. If, then, the social condition is such that the proprietor, ruined by usury, may be compelled to sell his possession, the means of his subsistence, he will sell it; and, thanks to the law, accumulated property—devouring and anthropophagous property—will be established. ”

“ The possession of property of any kind gives a curious consciousness of dignity to the human being who is its owner, due very likely to the traditional estimate of the importance of all possessions, and to the mystical but generally erroneous belief that property is in some way an outward and visible proof of the worth or the ability of its possessor—or his forbears. ”

“ The term 'property', as commonly used denotes any external object over which the right of property is exercised. In this sense it is a very wide term, and includes every class of acquisitions which a man can own or have an interest in. ”

“ It not being my intention to enter at present into a discussion of principles, I shall content myself with estimating, from the point of view of this simple and intelligible absolute, the theories of property which our generation has produced. ”

“ For we must not be deceived; in the phalanstery every thing will be as it is to-day, an object of property,—machines, inventions, thought, books, the products of art, of agriculture, and of industry; animals, houses, fences, vineyards, pastures, forests, fields,—every thing, in short, except the uncultivated land. Now, would you like to know what uncultivated land is worth, according to the advocates of property? ”

“ In short, as property is the subject of every equitable obligation, so the owner of property is the only person whose act or acts can be the means of creating an obligation in respect to that property. ”

“ Now, all experience shows that the great property-incentives are to increase property, protect property, and to buy with property those advantages which ought to be independent of property, viz., honors, dignities, power, and immunities. I cannot say how it is with men, but our histories are eloquent on this head. We have had the property-principle carried out thoroughly in our practice, and the result has shown that its chief operation is to render property as intact as possible, and the bones, and sinews, and marrow of all who do not possess it, its slaves. ”

“ Whence property came to be called the perfect right, the right of domain, the eminent right, the heroic or quiritaire right,—in Latin, jus perfectum, jus optimum, jus quiritarium, jus dominii,—while possession became assimilated to farm-rent. ”

“ If we would have civilization and the exertion indispensable to its success, we must have property; if we have property, we must have its rights; if we have the rights of property, we must take those consequences of the rights of property which are inseparable from the rights themselves. ”

“ The owners of property bulwark themselves with certain prerogatives that have proved of the greatest importance in the conservation of property interests. Speaking broadly, there are four characteristic features of the shares of income which are derived from the ownership of property. ”

“ Should there be the slightest irregularity in the method of transfer, men, members of society, imprescriptible possessors of the land, might be deprived at one blow of property, possession, and the means of production. ”

“ The very distinction made in legal terminology between real and personal property is but the survival of a primitive distinction between what was originally looked upon as common property and what from its nature was always considered the peculiar property of the individual. ”

“ Property in land may be called property in natural resources—property in things that man did not make.
Then there is property in things that man has made. Property in food, property in clothing, property in houses, and property in the mills and machinery with which food, clothing, houses and all other manufactured articles are made.
Now, why should anyone wish a property right in anything? Why should anyone wish to say of anything on earth: “This is mine. ”

“ For this value or wealth, produced by the activity of all, is by the very fact of its creation collective wealth, the use of which, like that of the land, may be divided, but which as property remains undivided. ”

“ Property is divided into eight classes, thus:—
"Property inherited from a father, a thing bought, a pledge, property given to a wife after marriage by her husband's family, a gift, property obtained for performing a sacrifice, the property of re-united copartners, and wages as the eighth.
"Whatever belonging to these eight kinds of property has been enjoyed by another person for ten years continuously is lost to the owner. ”

“ The man who owns a house has the right to benefit by enjoying its shelter, by selling it, or by renting it. This right, the right to or in the benefits of wealth—or more briefly, the right to or in the wealth itself—is called a "property right" or simply "property." ”

“ As the term 'property' not only implies a permanent possession of something, or a possession which can only be given up with the good will of the possessor, but also a possession recognised as a right, an inquiry into the origin of property must involve both these questions, but it is not the less important that the distinction between them should be observed. ”

“ Property being embodied and accumulated labor, it becomes endowed, in all places where the rights of labor are recognized, with the attributes and incidents of titles or evidence of just ownership or possession—inchoate, legal, or equitable—which inhere in the property, follow it, and form a component part of it wherever found. ”

“ One of the foremost precepts of the natural law is man’s right to the possession and the use of his property. And a man’s earnings are his property as much as his land and the house in which he lives. Indeed, in the industrial age, earnings are probably the most prevalent form of property. ”

“ As is the property of a nation, so is its family, its marriage, its religion, its civil and military organization, and its legislative and judicial institutions. History, viewed from this standpoint, is a grand and sublime psychological study. ”

“ Property is admitted to have an existence, even in the savage state of nature. The bow, the arrow, and the tomahawk; the hunting and the fishing ground, are species of property, as important to an American savage, as pearls, rubies, and diamonds are to the Mogul, or a Nabob in the East, or the lands, tenements, hereditaments, messages, gold and silver of the Europeans. And if property is necessary for the support of savage life, it is by no means less so in civil society. ”

“ What means, then, this dithyramb upon property?
"The right of property is the most important of human institutions."...
Yes; as monarchy is the most glorious.
"The original cause of man's prosperity upon earth." ”

“ Such an author teaches that property is a civil right, born of occupation and sanctioned by law; another maintains that it is a natural right, originating in labor,—and both of these doctrines, totally opposed as they may seem, are encouraged and applauded. I contend that neither labor, nor occupation, nor law, can create property ”