As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.  ~Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

Property is organized robbery.  ~George Bernard Shaw


A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.  ~Theodore Roosevelt


Few rich men own their property; the property owns them.  ~Robert Ingersoll, speech, New York, 29 October 1896


What we call real estate - the solid ground to build a house on - is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne


No man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic also.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


It is preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly.  ~Bertrand Russell, Principles of Social Reconstruction, 1917


[T]he recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses.  It has led Individualism entirely astray.  It has made gain, not growth its aim.  So that man thought that the important thing is to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be.  ~Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism


The slogan of the National Association of Landlords is the commaless "We Shelter You America."  The truth of the matter is, however, that landlords shelter no one, while in fact the law shelters them... from the immediate expropriation that would occur if there were not force of gun and jail to back up this phoney, abusive, so-called property right.  ~Fred Woodworth, Rent: An Injustice


Don't you know that if people could bottle the air they would?  Don't you know that there would be an American Air-bottling Association?  And don't you know that they would allow thousands and millions to die for want of breath, if they could not pay for air?  I am not blaming anybody.  I am just telling how it is.  ~Robert Ingersoll, A Lay Sermon


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."  ~Johann Most, The Beast of Property


The things you own end up owning you.  It's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything.  ~From the movie Fight Club, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk


Individual possession is the great entering wedge, which has split society into eight hundred million fragments.... It virtually, practically, and theoretically denies the brotherhood of man.  ~Hiram Stafford, The Liberator, 8 September 1844


Land: A part of the earth's surface, considered as property.  The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure.  Carried to its logical conclusion, it means that some have the right to prevent others from living; for the right to own implies the right exclusively to occupy; and in fact laws of trespass are enacted wherever property in land is recognized.  It follows that if the whole area of terra firma is owned by A, B, and C, there will be no place for D, E, F and G to be born, or, born as trespassers, to exist.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary


The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.  From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not anyone have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.  ~Jean Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

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