Land Reform Quotes

A secure and independent agricultural peasantry is the only base on which a people rises.

For centuries we've treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good... [A model of shared equity] will mean that families, especially white families who are homeowners, are going to have a different relationship to property than the one we currently have.

I want to see a public man come forward and say what the Irish question is ... Thus you have a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church, and in addition the weakest executive in the world ... That is the Irish question in its integrity.

Power always follows Property. This I believe to be as infallible a Maxim, in Politicks, as, that Action and Re-action are equal, is in Mechanicks. Nay I believe We may advance one Step farther and affirm that the Ballance of Power in a Society, accompanies the Ballance of Property in Land. The only possible Way then of preserving the Ballance of Power on the side of equal Liberty and public Virtue, is to make the Acquisition of Land easy to every Member of Society: to make a Division of the Land into Small Quantities, So that the Multitude may be possessed of landed Estates. If the Multitude is possessed of the Ballance of real Estate, the Multitude will have the Ballance of Power, and in that Case the Multitude will take Care of the Liberty, Virtue, and Interest of the Multitude in all Acts of Government.

Peace, Bread & Land

Only by abolishing private property in land and building cheap and hygienic dwellings can the housing problem be solved.

An issue between a people and a class

An allusion has been made to the Homestead Law. I think it worthy of consideration, and that the wild lands of the country should be distributed so that every man should have the means and opportunity of benefitting his condition.

For the Negro, Andrew Johnson did less than nothing when once he realized that the chief beneficiary of labor and economic reform in the South would be freedmen. His inability to picture Negroes as men made him oppose efforts to give them land; oppose national efforts to educate them; and above all things, oppose their rights to vote.

The small land holders are the most precious part of a state.

This demand for fixity of tenure is not, as is often supposed, a mere cry of disaffected and impracticable Socialists. It springs from a vague but true perception of the causes of the depression under which the agricultural interest, and with it the whole prosperity of Ireland, labors

Private ownership of land is abolished. The entire land fund is declared the property of the nation and turned over free of cost to the toilers on the basis of equal right to its use.

Land is the productivity of our country.

Alien ownership of land should be prohibited…. all lands now owned by aliens should be reclaimed by the government and held for actual settlers

…the plebeians and the Senate of Rome were often at strife with each other concerning the enactment of laws, the canceling of debts, the division of lands, or the election of magistrates.

The only thing the Socialist [Communist] party could do for the peasant--said the Bolsheviks--was to help organize the paid agricultural laborers.

Take immediate and decisive steps to better the condition of the peasant. Abandon the system of war-time Communism by which we practically took from the peasant all his surplus, and sometimes what was not his surplus but part of his necessary subsistence.

Aggressive land reform would be far less destabilizing than a violent revolt.

it would be impossible to liberate the serf otherwise than by endowing him with land.

Land ownership in Guatemala is more unequal than anywhere else in Latin America. Roughly 90 percent of Guatemalan farms are too small to support a family. A tiny group of Guatemalans owns a third of the country's arable land; more than 300,000 landless peasants must scrounge a living as best they can.

My father's family were liquidated during the Cultural Revolution in China because they were landowners. He was the only one to escape. I was born and brought up in Taiwan. But you absorb the trauma. My parents had no sense of security.

England is not a Free People, till the Poor that have no Land, have a free allowance to dig and labour the Commons, and so live as Comfortably as the Landlords that live in their Inclosures. For the People have not laid out their Monies, and shed their Bloud, that their Landlords, the Norman power, should still have its liberty and freedom to rule in Tyranny …

Nationalization of Land

When I was operating as one of President Reagan's economic advisers, an early assignment was to analyze the federal government's landholdings and make recommendations about what to do with them. This was a big job. These lands are vast, covering an area six times that of France.

We will accelerate our land redistribution program not only to redress a grave historical injustice but also to bring more producers into the agricultural sector and to make more land available for cultivation.