A Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered on the subject.

George Bernard Shaw

Quote Topics

Been Only Perfect Property Said Subject Theft Truism

Quote Author

George Bernard Shaw
Irish - Playwright
July 26, 1856 - November 2, 1950

A father of the church said that property was theft, many centuries before Proudhon was born. Bourdaloue reaffirmed it. Montesquieu was the inventor of national workshops and of the theory that the state owed every man a living. Nay, was not the church herself the first organized democracy?

James Russell Lowell

Slavery is theft - theft of a life, theft of work, theft of any property or produce, theft even of the children a slave might have borne.

Kevin Bales

One philosopher has rightly said that property is theft. But I'd like to use my future ownership of property to give something back.

George Carlin

Some French socialist said that private property was theft... I say that private property is a nuisance.

Paul Erdos

One ideological claim is that private property is theft, that the natural product of the existence of property is evil, and that private ownership therefore should not exist... What those who feel this way don't realize is that property is a notion that has to do with control - that property is a system for the disposal of power. The absence of property almost always means the concentration of power in the state.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

I suppose the pleasure of the country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live. That is a truism when said, but anything but a truism when daily observed. Nothing shows up the difference between the thing said or read, so much as the daily experience of it.

Vita Sackville-West

I hear Republicans and Libertarians and so forth talking about property rights, but they stop talking about property rights as soon as the subject of American Indians comes up, because they know fully well, perhaps not in a fully articulated, conscious form, but they know fully well that the basis for the very system of endeavor and enterprise and profitability to which they are committed and devoted accrues on the basis of theft of the resources of someone else. They are in possession of stolen property. They know it. They all know it. It's a dishonest endeavor from day one.

Ward Churchill

It will probably surprise many who know nothing of Proudhon save his declaration that 'property is robbery' to learn that he was perhaps the most vigorous hater of Communism that ever lived on this planet. But the apparent inconsistency vanishes when you read his book and find that by property he means simply legally privileged wealth or the power of usury, and not at all the possession by the labourer of his products.

Benjamin Tucker

The subject is said to have the property of making dull men eloquent.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Property is theft.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Where there's property, there's theft.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Property isn't theft: it's nothing.

Fernando Pessoa

It is not theft, properly speaking, to take secretly and use another's property in a case of extreme need: because that which he takes for the support of his life becomes his own property by reason of that need

Thomas Aquinas

All property is theft, except mine.

Terry Pratchett

The other day my house caught fire. My lawyer said, "Shouldn't be a problem. What kind of coverage do you have?" I said, "Fire and theft." The lawyer frowned. "Uh oh. Wrong kind. Should be fire OR theft."