Henry George Quotes
What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power.
What protectionism teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.
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.
Laissez faire (in its full true meaning) opens the way to the realization of the noble dreams of socialism.
That which is unjust can really profit no one; that which is just can really harm no one.
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 can be to the ownership of anything no rightful title which is not derived from the title of the producer and does not rest upon the natural right of the man to himself.
There are people into whose heads it never enters to conceive of any better state of society than that which now exists.
In all the new states of the Union, land monopolization has gone on at an alarming rate, but in none of them so fast as in California, and in none of them, perhaps, are the evil effects so manifest.
The fundamental principle of human action, the law, that is to political economy what the law of gravitation is to physics is that men seek to gratify their desires with the least exertion
Private ownership of land is the nether mill-stone. Material progress is the upper mill-stone. Between them, with an increasing pressure, the working classes are being ground.
I propose to beg no question to shrink from no conclusion, but to follow truth wherever it may lead.
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.
The state, it cannot too often be repeated, does nothing, and can give nothing, which it does not take from somebody.
Poverty is the openmouthed relentless hell which yawns beneath civilized society. And it is hell enough.
For as labor cannot produce without the use of land, the denial of the equal right to the use of land is necessarily the denial of the labor to its own produce.
Passing into higher forms of desire, that which slumbered in the plant, and fitfully stirred in the beast, awakes in the man.
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.
The man who gives me employment, which I must have or suffer, that man is my master, let me call him what I will.
He who sees the truth, let him proclaim it, without asking who is for it or who is against it.
I do not think that any sorrow of youth or manhood equalled in intensity or duration the black and hopeless misery which followed the wrench of transference from a happy home to a school.
The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.
The value of a thing is the amount of laboring or work that its possession will save the possessor.
God showers upon us his gifts-more than enough for all; But like swine scrambling for food, we tread them in the mire, and rend each other.
That amid our highest civilization men faint and die with want is not due to the niggardliness of nature, but to the injustice of man.
The methods by which a trade union can alone act, are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical.
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.
