Henry George
The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.Collection: Imagination
Man is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; the only animal that is never satisfied.
Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power.
There is danger in reckless change, but greater danger in blind conservatism.
He who sees the truth, let him proclaim it, without asking who is for it or who is against it.
Progressive societies outgrow institutions as children outgrow clothes.
Capital is a result of labor, and is used by labor to assist it in further production. Labor is the active and initial force, and labor is therefore the employer of capital.
How can a man be said to have a country when he has not right of a square inch of it.
What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power.
That which is unjust can really profit no one; that which is just can really harm no one.
Poorly paid labor is inefficient labor, the world over.
How many men are there who fairly earn a million dollars?
The man who gives me employment, which I must have or suffer, that man is my master, let me call him what I will.
The methods by which a trade union can alone act, are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical.
There are only three ways by which any individual can get wealth — by work, by gift or by theft. And, clearly, the reason why the workers get so little is that the beggars and thieves get so much.Collection: Money
The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in this world, and others no right.Collection: Men
What protectionism teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.Collection: War
Charity is false, futile, and poisonous when offered as a substitute for justice.Collection: Justice
It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly. Government should be repressive no further than is necessary to secure liberty by protecting the equal rights of each from aggression on the part of others, and the moment governmental prohibitions extend beyond this line they are in danger of defeating the very ends they are intended to serve.Collection: Religious
The tax upon land values is the most just and equal of all taxes. It falls only upon those who receive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in proportion to the benefit they receive.It is the taking by the community for the use of the community of that value which is the creation of the community. It is the application of the common property to common uses. When all rent is taken by taxation for the needs of the community, then will the equality ordained by nature be attained.Collection: Fall
Social reform is not to be secured by noise and shouting; by complaints and denunciation; by the formation of parties, or the making of revolutions; but by the awakening of thought and the progress of ideas. Until there be correct thought, there cannot be right action; and when there is correct thought, right action will follow.Collection: Party
As it becomes more and more difficult to get land, so will the virtual enslavement of the laboring-classe s go on. As the value of land rises, more and more of the earnings of labor will be demanded for the use of land, until finally nothing is left to laborers but the wages of slavery -- a bare living.Collection: Land
The protection of the masses has in all times been the pretense of tyranny - the plea of monarchy, of aristocracy, of special privilege of every kind. The slave owners justified slavery as protecting the slaves.Collection: Slave Owners
Property in land is as indefensible as property in man.Collection: Men
To prevent government from becoming corrupt and tyrannous, its organization and methods should be as simple as possible, its functions be restricted to those necessary to the common welfare, and in all its parts it should be kept as close to the people and as directly within their control as may be.Collection: Simple
There are people into whose heads it never enters to conceive of any better state of society than that which now exists.Collection: People
Liberty calls to us again. We must follow her further; we must trust her fully. Either we must wholly accept her or she will not stay. It is not enough that men should vote; it is not enough that they should be theoretically equal before the law. They must have liberty to avail themselves of the opportunities and means of life; they must stand on equal terms with reference to the bounty of Nature.Collection: Mean
Laissez faire (in its full true meaning) opens the way to the realization of the noble dreams of socialism.Collection: Dream
The people themselves must think, because the people alone can act.Collection: Thinking
So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.Collection: Real
The ideal social state is not that in which each gets an equal amount of wealth, but in which each gets in proportion to his contribution to the general stock.Collection: Wealth
Blockading squadrons are a means whereby nations seek to prevent their enemies from trading; protective tariffs are a means whereby nations attempt to prevent their own people from trading. What protectionism teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.Collection: War
A good, very good, not to say admirable schoolmaster, but then he is only a schoolmaster.Collection: Very Good
Man must be doing something, or fancy that he is doing something, for in him throbs the creative impulse; the mere basker in the sunshine is not a natural, but an abnormal man.Collection: Sunshine
Social progress makes the well-being of all more and more the business of each.Collection: Business
The word capital, as philologists trace it, comes down to us from a time when wealth was estimated in cattle, and a man's income depended upon the number of head he could keep for their increase.Collection: Wisdom
It is as to whether its services or uses are to be exchanged or not which makes a tool an article of capital or merely an article of wealth. Thus, the lathe of a manufacturer used in making things which are to be exchanged is capital, while the lathe kept by a gentleman for his own amusement is not.Collection: Gentleman
What would happen to the individual if all the functions of the body were placed under the control of the consciousness is what would happen to a nation in which all individual activities were directed by government.Collection: Government
Let no man imagine that he has no influence.Collection: Men
I propose to beg no question to shrink from no conclusion, but to follow truth wherever it may lead.Collection: May
Poverty is the openmouthed relentless hell which yawns beneath civilized society. And it is hell enough.Collection: Society
It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly.Collection: Religious
The great work of the present for every man, and every organization of men, who would improve social conditions, is the work of education the propagation of ideas. It is only as it aids this that anything else can avail. And in this work every one who can think may aid first by forming clear ideas himself, and then by endeavoring to arouse the thought of those with whom he comes in contact.Collection: Men
No person, I think, ever saw a herd of buffalo, of which a few were fat and the great majority lean. No person ever saw a flock of birds, of which two or three were swimming in grease, and the others all skin and bone.Collection: Swimming
The state, it cannot too often be repeated, does nothing, and can give nothing, which it does not take from somebody.Collection: Often Is
As it is with an individual, so it is with a nation. One must produce to have, or one will become a have-not.Collection: Individual
It is not from top to bottom that societies die; it is from bottom to top.Collection: Bottom
Trade has ever been the extinguisher of war, the eradicator of prejudice, the diffuser of knowledge.Collection: War
The tolerance of wrong dulls our sense of its injustice. Men may become accustomed to theft, murder, even to slavery - that sum of all villainies - so they see no injustice in it, yet that which is unjust is unjust still.Collection: Men
Whence shall come the new barbarians? Go through the squalid quarters of great cities, and you may see, even now, their gathering hordes! How shall learning perish? Men will cease to read, and books will kindle fires and be turned into cartridges.Collection: Book