Toni Morrison Quotes
Grab this land! Take it, hold it, my brothers, make it, my brothers, shake it, squeeze it, turn it, twist it, beat it, kick it, kiss it, whip it, stomp it, dig it, plow it, seed it, reap it, rent it, buy it, sell it, own it, build it, multiply it, and pass it on — can you hear me? Pass it on!
Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. Alfred A. Knopf, 1977, p. 235.
Use included renting it. What he opposed was simply holding land when whites were driving Indians off their lands because all the unused land outside of the reservation was owned by someone and the asking price was very high. Ingersoll was considered to be the greatest orator and political thinker of his day, but his overt atheistic views curtailed his elected political career.
This statement was quite controversial when it was published and remains so. Many libertarians and private sector enthusiasts see giving this power to government is too much and erodes the sanctity of private property. Nonetheless, most local and state government in America subscribes to this point of view thus allowing zoning, city planning, condemnation of private property for public use and the like. In 1976 when it was promulgated, President Ronald Reagan discussed it in his weekly radio address.
The Diggers were a religious-economic movement that even today would be considered very radical. They advocated the right of the poor to go onto public lands and farm them—thus the name “Diggers.” Beyond their opposition to the private ownership of land to the exclusion of the poor, Winstanley and the Diggers promulgated another very modern doctrine: That the poor should take the responsibility and have the right to determinine how the society should provide for the poor. A version of this became one of the Mottos of the Poverty Program of 1964. See {616966}.
Paine, one of America’s founding fathers and the man most responsible for influencing Americans to revolt, is generally not given much attention in modern times. One of the main reasons was that his philosophy regarding land and land ownership is today considered socialist if not communist. Paine’s other views are mostly Apple pie American, but this is shocking to many Americans.
The major revenue of the Federal Government had initially been import duties. (There was no income tax then.) The sale of the vast public lands turned out to be another Federal income source.
See {627027} for an earlier expression of this point.
The Bushmen are of the indigenous people of Botswana who have only had extended contact with the larger world recently.
Essentially whereas many property owners have paid for their ownership in recent times, almost all real estate, wherever it is, that is privately owned was at some time in the past obtained by force, fraud, deceit, from someone else. In most cases, the owners who were killed, defrauded or otherwise removed from their land, had previously killed, defrauded or otherwise removed owners before them. There is almost no guilt untainted land. This was not just a product of capitalism, but has been a factor in every ism that has governed human society.
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist, essayist, book editor, and college professor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she gained worldwide recognition when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
