13 quotes
There are people into whose heads it never enters to conceive of any better state of society than that which now exists.
Progress and Poverty (1879)
It is too narrow an understanding of production which confines it merely to the making of things. Production includes not merely the making of things, but the bringing of them to the consumer.
Progress and Poverty (1879)
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.
Progress and Poverty (1879)
In the plan of forcing by endurance an increase of wages, there are in such methods inherent disadvantages which workingmen should not blink.
Progress and Poverty (1879)
I am no sentimental admirer of the savage state.
Progress and Poverty (1879)
Now, however, we are coming into collision with facts which there can be no mistaking.
Progress and Poverty (1879)
The real trouble must be that supply is somehow prevented from satisfying demand, that somewhere there is an obstacle which prevents labor from producing the things that laborers want.
Progress and Poverty (1879)
It is as though an immense wedge were being forced, not underneath society, but through society. Those who are above the point of separation are elevated, but those who are below are crushed down.
Progress and Poverty (1879)
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 right of labor to its own produce.
Progress and Poverty (1879)
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.
Progress and Poverty (1879)
Yet where productive power is at its highest development they cannot. Why? Is it not because in the one case he has access to the material and forces of nature, and in the other this access is denied?
Progress and Poverty (1879)
In his own wants, in the needs of his anxious wife, in the demands of his half-cared-for, perhaps even hungry and shivering children, there is demand enough for labor, Heaven knows! In his own willing hands is the supply.
Progress and Poverty (1879)
It is a well-provisioned ship, this on which we sail through space. If the bread and beef above decks seem to grow scarce, we but open a hatch and there is a new supply, of which before we never dreamed. And very great command over the services of others comes to those who as the hatches are opened are permitted to say, "This is mine!"
Progress and Poverty (1879)