John Locke (1632-1704)
The reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property.
Samuel Adams (1722-1803)
Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, and thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.
William Blackstone (1723-1780)
So great moreover is the regard of the law for private property, that it will not authorize the least violation of it; no, not even for the general good of the whole community.
George Washington (1732-1799)
Freedom and Property Rights are inseparable. You can’t have one without the other.
John Adams (1735-1826)
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- If “Thou shalt not covet,” and “Thou shalt not steal,” were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society, before it can be civilized or made free.
- Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist.
- Property is surely a right of mankind as real as liberty.
- The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.
- [D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man’s life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few.
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Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
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- A right to property is founded in our natural wants, in the means with which we are endowed to satisfy these wants, and the right to what we acquire by those means without violating the similar rights of other sensible beings.
- Our wish is that…[there be] maintained that state of property, equal or unequal, which results to every man from his own industry or that of his fathers.
- To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father’s has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association-the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.
- A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.
- Take not from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.
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James Madison (1751-1836)
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- The rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted.
- Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.
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Daniel Webster (1782-1852)
The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions.
Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933)
Ultimately property rights and personal rights are the same thing.
Ronald Reagan (1911-2004)
It doesn’t require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the deed or the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of life and death over that business or property?
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This compilation copyright © 2021 by B. Nathaniel Sullivan. All rights reserved.