A Quote by R. H. Tawney

Private property is a necessary institution, at least in a fallen world; men work more and dispute less when goods are private than when they are in common.

R. H. Tawney

Quote Topics

Common Dispute Fallen Fallen World Goods Institution Least Less Men More Necessary Private Private Property Property Than Work World

Quote Author

R. H. Tawney
English - Professor
November 30, 1880 - January 16, 1962

But the instinct of hoarding, like all other instincts, tends to become hypertrophied and perverted; and with the institution of private property comes another institution-that of plunder and brigandage. In private life, no motive of action is at present so powerful and so persistent as acquisitiveness, which unlike most other desires, knows no satiety. The average man is rich enough when he has a little more than he has got, and not till then.

William Ralph Inge

What I do know is, in little more than 30 years, we have gone from a nation where the “quiet enjoyment” of one’s private property was a sacred right, to a day when the so-called property “owner” faces a hovering hoard of taxmen and regulators threatening to lien, foreclose, and “go to auction” at the first sign of private defiance of their collective will ... a relationship between government and private property rights which my dictionary defines as “fascism.”

Vin Suprynowicz

The Christian has a great advantage over other men, not by being less fallen than they, nor less doomed to live in a fallen world, but by knowing that he is a fallen man in a fallen world.

C. S. Lewis

In the end, it is because the media are driven by the power and wealth of private individuals that they turn private lives into public spectacles. If every private life is now potentially public property, it is because private property has undermined public responsibility.

Terry Eagleton

Food that is necessary for man’s existence is as sacred as life itself. Everything that is indispensable for its preservation is the common property of society as a whole. It is only the surplus that is private property and can be safely left to individual commercial enterprise.

Maximilien Robespierre

We conventionally divide space into private and public realms, and we know these legal distinctions very well because we've become experts at protecting our private property and private space. But we're less attuned to the nuances of the public.

Elizabeth Diller

It has been the fashion to speak of the conflict between human rights and property rights, and from this it has come to be widely believed that the use of private property is tainted with evil and should not be espoused by rational and civilized men... the only dependable foundation of personal liberty is the personal economic security of private property. The Good Society.

Walter Lippmann

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

If history could prove and teach us anything, it would be the private ownership of the means of production as a necessary requisite of civilization and material well-being. All civilizations have up to now been based on private property. Only nations committed to the principle of private property have risen above penury and produced science, art, and literature. There is no experience to show that any other social system could provide mankind with any of the achievements of civilization.

Ludwig von Mises

We are so accustomed to the miracle of private enterprise that we habitually take it for granted. But how does private industry solve the incredibly complex problem of turning out tens of thousands of different goods and services in the proportions in which they are wanted by the public? ... It solves these problems through the institutions of private property, competition, the free market, and the existence of money - through the interrelations of supply and demand, costs and prices, profits and losses.

Henry Hazlitt

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.

Karl Marx

Christ represents originally: 1) men before God; 2) God for men; 3) men to man. Similarly, money represents originally, in accordance with the idea of money: 1) private property for private property; 2) society for private property; 3) private property for society. But Christ is alienated God and alienated man. God has value only insofar as he represents Christ, and man has value only insofar as he represents Christ. It is the same with money.

Karl Marx

It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institutions of private property.

Oscar Wilde

Personally I think that private property has a right to be defended. Our civilisation is built up on property, and can only be defended by private property.

Winston Churchill

The idea of private property universal but private, the idea of families free but still families, of domesticity democratic but still domestic, of one man one house - this remains the real vision and magnet of mankind. The world may accept something more official and general, less human and intimate. But the world will be like a broken-hearted woman who makes a humdrum marriage because she may not make a happy one; Socialism may be the world's deliverance, but it is not the world's desire.