James Fenimore Cooper Quotes

The foundation of any and every civilization, including our own, is private ownership of the means of production. Whoever wishes to criticize modern civilization, therefore, begins with private property.

The rise of man from the animal to the human level was prolonged by the necessity of rising from a state of barbarism and violence to one of order and peace.

The nobility of a human being is strictly independent of that of his convictions.

The history of the world demonstrates that man becomes what we call civilized by increasing his wants.

The major challenge facing us is to elevate our national life to the highest level of civilization and prosperity.

No community ever did or ever can emerge unassisted by external helps from a state of utter barbarism into anything that can be called civilization

In every civilized society property rights must be carefully safeguarded; ordinarily, and in the great majority of cases, human rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the long run identical; but when it clearly appears that there is a real conflict between them, human rights must have the upper hand, for property belongs to man and not man to property.

As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions.

There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?

What men call civilization is the condition of present customs; what they call barbarism, the condition of past ones.

Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.

Property isn't theft: it's nothing.

There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.

There is, of course, a difference between what one seizes and what one really possesses.

Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces.

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.

Men honor property above all else; it has the greatest power in human life.

There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property.

What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.

Without property rights, no other rights are possible.

In the last analysis civilization itself is measured by the way in which children will live and what chance they will have in the world

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.

How can land be owned by another man. Warns one can not steal what was given as a gift. Is the sky owned by birds and the rivers owned by fish.

He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted.