Oscar Wilde Quotes

Huge inequality gaps in a democratic society will tend to erode the respect for and security of doctrines of private property. The large majority must either own property or have reasonable prospects of attaining property if they are to support and maintain private property laws and traditions.

To each, therefore, must be given his own share of goods, and the distribution of created goods, which, as every discerning person knows, is laboring today under the gravest evils due to the huge disparity between the few exceedingly rich and the unnumbered propertyless, must be effectively called back to and brought into conformity with the norms of the common good, that is, social justice.

It must be assumed and established as a principle, that the right of private property must be regarded as sacred. Wherefore, the law ought to favor this right and, so far as it can, see that the largest possible number among the masses of the population prefer to own property.... But if the productive activity of the multitude can be stimulated by the hope of acquiring some property... , it will gradually come to pass that, with the difference between extreme wealth and extreme penury removed, one class will become the neighbor to the other.

To understand the Left, one must understand that in its view the greatest evil is material inequality. The Left is more troubled by economic inequality than by evil as humanity has generally understood the term.

Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff

Justice is the means by which established injustices are sanctioned.

Support of private ownership does not mean that anyone has the right to unlimited accumulation of wealth

When private property ceases to make free men, its only spiritual justification goes. Democracy and the widespread distribution of private property go together.

Rising inequality is not a law of nature - it's not even a law of economics. It is a consequence of political and economic arrangements, and those arrangements can be changed.

The institution of private property... is undergoing, at this time, a strain never put on it before. Not because the corporation, in essence, is retrogressive or unrepublican, but because in fact, it is unrepublican, and for that reason retrogressive also.

Let the amelioration in our laws of property proceed from the concession of the rich, not from the grasping of the poor. Let us understand that the equitable rule is, that no one should take more than his share, let him be ever so rich.

In conditions of private property ... "life-activity" stands in the service of property instead of property standing the service of free life-activity.

Egalitarianism, in every form and shape, is incompatible with the idea of private property.

All revolutions more or less threaten the tenure of property: but most of those who live in democratic countries are possessed of property - not only are they possessed of property but they live in the condition of men who set the greatest store upon their property.

And with respect to the mode in which these general principles affect the secure possession of property, so far am I from invalidating such security, that the whole gist of these papers will be found ultimately to aim at an extension in its range; and whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.

From the respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind.

All property is theft, except mine.

The politics of envy is the politics of this commandment: "Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote." It is the politics of two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.

It is also true that the less possible it becomes for a man to acquire a new fortune, the more must the existing fortunes appear as privileges for which there is no justification. Policy is then certain to aim at taking these fortunes out of private hands, either by the slow process of heavy taxation of inheritance or by the quicker one of outright confiscation. A system based on private property and control of the means of production presupposes that such property and control can be acquired by any successful man.

Capitalism Survive?—I have tried to show that a socialist form of society will inevitably emerge from an equally inevitable decomposition of capitalist society.

There is not a more dangerous experiment than to place property in the hands of one class, and political power in those of another... If property cannot retain the political power, the political power will draw after it the property.

The rich don't have to kill to eat. They employ people, as they call it. The rich don't do evil themselves. They pay. People do all they can to please them, and everybody's happy.

What is economics? A science invented by the upper class in order to acquire the fruits of the labor of the underclass

It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves.