Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Quotes

Property is theft.

Poverty is curable, but it’s just not done, because it's not profitable. And that is the kind of violence that's perpetuated on humanity.

Property in man, always morally unjust, has become nationally dangerous.

It is not possible that one man can convert another into a piece of property, thus at once annihilating all his personal rights, without the most flagrant injustice and usurpation.

The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people.

Racial injustice, war, urban blight, and environmental rape have a common denominator in our exploitative economic system.

There are three ways by which an individual can get wealth—by work, by gift, and by theft. And, clearly, the reason why the workers get so little is that the beggars and thieves get so much.

Labor is, on the one hand, more and more furnished by a class; Property or Capital, on the other, held and controlled by another class. Here you have workers without property—the proletariat. There you have property without work—or capital…. The workers without property are excluded from their products, from the riches they create—which accumulate in the hands of the property holders, capitalists and large land-owners.

Civil Propriety is the Curse, is manifest thus, Those that Buy and Sell Land, and are landlords, have got it either by Oppression, or Murther, or Theft; and all landlords lives in the breach of the Seventh and Eighth Commandements, Thous shalt not steal, nor kill.

Capitalism tries for a delicate balance: It attempts to work things out so that everyone gets just enough stuff to keep them from getting violent and trying to take other people’s stuff.

At this late stage in the history of American capitalism I'm not sure I know how much testimony still needs to be presented to establish the relation between profit and theft.

Capitalism is the worst friend of humanity.

Slavery is malignantly aristocratic.

I think that capitalism in general is responsible, not for the worldwide recession, but for a lot of suffering, both in the United States and around the world.

Capitalism proceeds through creative destruction. What is created is capitalism in a 'new and improved' form - and what is destroyed is self-sustaining capacity, livelihood and dignity of its innumerable and multiplied 'host organisms' into which all of us are drawn/seduced one way or another.

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

Reckless capitalism kills black people.

It is the lash of hunger which compels the poor man to submit. In order to live he must sell - 'voluntarily' sell - himself every day and hour to the 'beast of property.'

Humans are insane. We kill our own people, starve our own people, sell them, work them to death, beat them, don't give them affordable/free/good healthcare, and let them live in misery, while a few of us have - we have all we want. We are evil.

The poor North has much to do with slavery. It staggers under its load and smarts under its lash.

It's not difficult in South Africa for the ordinary person to see the link between capitalism and racist exploitation, and when one sees the link one immediately thinks in terms of a socialist alternative.

Neither can men, by the same principles, be considered as lands, goods, or houses, among possessions. It is necessary that all property should be inferiour to its possessor. But how does the slave differ from his master, but by chance?

There is a real fear around shifting from our existing economic system because people believe it gives us social organisation, a sense of freedom, and the ability to be nice to each other. Growth is seen as a social lubricant that allows us to be socially responsible.

The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 146 of us are burned to death.

The white man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it.