Thomas Jefferson Quotes

Ultimately property rights and personal rights are the same thing.

The law may do what it will with the owner of property, its just power will still attach to the cent.

Ownership is a very complex judicial concept.

Possession, they say, is eleven points of the law.

AXIOM. — Property is the Right of Increase claimed by the Proprietor over any thing which he has stamped as his own.

To use is necessary. And if you can't be used, then you're useless.

Possession is eleven points in the law.

It's mine - you can't have it. If you want to use it for something, then you have to negotiate with me. I have to agree, I have to understand what I'm getting in return.

[Property] embraces everything to which a man may attach a value and have a right.

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.

Without property rights, no other rights are possible.

If You Cannot Protect What You Own, You Don’t Own Anything!

I hated being a child because to be a child means that you are essentially the property of your parents, benevolently or not.

There is no such thing as absolute free speech; there are only absolute rights of private property. Speech is circumscribed by private property rights. You may deliver a disquisition in my virtual or actual living room only if I permit you to so do.

Copying is not theft. Because when you steal something it means the other person doesn't have it anymore.

And the desire to own property, to take for ourselves things which in no way belong to us, does not stop short at the sun. The air is already bought and sold as a commodity, by health resorts. And what of water? Or waterpower? Why should the earth be parceled out into private hands? Is it any different from the sun? No; the earth belongs to the people who live on it. God intended it for them, but it has been taken over by private individuals. Privare means to steal. Thus private property is stolen property - property stolen from God and from humankind!

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.

Private property is a means, and neither its abolition nor its unrestricted right should be an end in itself.

There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe. And yet there are very few, that will give themselves the trouble to consider the original and foundation of this right.

It's long been common practice among many to draw a distinction between "human rights" and "property rights," suggesting that the two are separate and unequal - with "property rights" second to "human rights."

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

All sentient beings should have at least one right—the right not to be treated as property

I refuse to pronounce the names of possession and nonpossession.

Design means being good, not just looking good.