William Cobbett Quotes

I have a right to nothing which another has a right to take away

The denial of the right of ownership to a man is a denial of his basic freedom: freedom without property is always incomplete. To be "secured" - but with no accompanying responsibility - is to be the slave of whatever group provides the security.

You have to ask yourself, 'Who owns me? Do I own myself or am I just another piece of government property?'

Make no mistake. Without individual property, none are free.

And there is no difference, in principle - but only in degree - between political and chattel slavery. The former, no less than the latter, denies a man's ownership of himself and the products of his labor; and asserts that other men may own him, and dispose of him and his property, for their uses, and at their pleasure.

The choice lies between property on the one hand and slavery, public or private, on the other. There is no third issue.

Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist.

To give a man his life but deny him his liberty, is to take from him all that makes his life worth living. To give him his liberty but take from him the property which is the fruit and badge of his liberty, is to still leave him a slave.

The right to life is the source of all rights -- and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.

No freedom is secure if your property rights are not secure.

In fact, a fundamental interdependence exists between the personal right to liberty and the personal right to property.

As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.

Property is surely a right of mankind as real as liberty.

Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.

Moral principles of liberty that endow a person with the right to claim and acquire property at the same time oblige that person to respect every other person’s equal right to do the same.

The absolute rights of individuals may be resolved into the right of personal security, the right of personal liberty, and the right to enjoy and acquire property

Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands are properly his.

Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, thirdly to property.

Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.

The only dependable foundation of personal liberty is the personal economic security of private property.

Every man has a right by nature to possess property as his own.

I did more for the Russian serf in giving him land as well as personal liberty, than America did for the Negro slave set free by the proclamation of President Lincoln. How could you Americans have been so blind as to leave the Negro slave without the tools to work out his own salvation ….Without property of any kind he cannot education himself or his children.

The rights to life, liberty and property were not meant to be subject to the vagaries of majority rule.

our society -- unlike most in the world -- presupposes that freedom and liberty are in a frame of reference that makes the individual, not government, the keeper of his tastes, beliefs, and ideas.

The principle of self-government cannot be violated with impunity. The individual's right to it is sacred - regardless of class, caste, race, color, sex or any other accident or incident of birth.