David Harvey Quotes

As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.

Land monopoly is not only monopoly, but it is by far the greatest of monopolies; it is a perpetual monopoly, and it is the mother of all other forms of monopoly.

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.

Prejudices of Political Economists against the Common Ownership in Land

One day thousands will desire this land.

We do not ever want our land policy to be shaped so as to create a big class of proprietors who rent to others..

Landlords grow rich in their sleep without working, risking or economizing. The increase in the value of land, arising as it does from the efforts of an entire community, should belong to the community and not to the individual who might hold title.

Why precisely do we want to change land ownership? The answer seems to me to be quite clear: to inhibit land speculation, to inhibit the private exploitation of the scarcity-value of land, to inhibit as we might say the cornering of land.

Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. The small landowners are the most precious part of a state

Who ordained that a few should have the land of Britain as a perquisite, who made 10,000 people owners of the soil and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth?

Land ownership has never been a problem. People have access to land. The peasants cannot complain about land ownership.

Furthermore, the unearned increment from land appears in the United States as a gain to the first comers, who have here laid the foundations of a new State.

Each landless citizen may occupy and appropriate a small allotment of the National Domain free of charge.

There is and can be no just title to an exclusive possession of the soil.

No man should be allowed to own any land he does not use.

Private ownership of land is abolished. The entire land fund is declared the property of the nation and turned over free of cost to the toilers on the basis of equal right to its use.

Aggressive land reform would be far less destabilizing than a violent revolt.

The proprietor [land owner], producing neither by his own labor nor by his implement, and receiving products in exchange for nothing, is either a parasite or a thief.

If my countrymen should ever wish for the honour of having among them a gentry enormously wealthy, let them sell their Farms & pay rack's rents; the Scale of the Landlords will rise as the tenants is depress'd, who will soon become poor, tattered, dirty and abject in Spirit.

There is land in Colombia, fortunately, for everybody. We don't have to expropriate land from people who are cultivating that land legally.

I don't think we can fix poverty without fixing housing, and I don't think we can address housing without understanding landlords.

The moment we put an end to speculation in land, we put an end to making money at the expense of our sons and daughters.

Cultivation is at least one of the greatest natural improvements ever made by human invention. It has given to created earth a tenfold value. But the landed monopoly that began with it has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss, and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before.

It is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.

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.