We must recollect . . .
what it is we have at stake, what it is we have to contend for. It
is for our property, it is for our liberty, it is for our
independence, nay, for our existence as a nation; . . .it is for
everything dear and valuable to man on this side of the grave.
– William Pitt July 1803,1759-1806
The Oxford
Dictionary of Quotations, 2nd Ed. Revised, 1966
[379:15].
Property has its duties
as well as its rights. – Thomas Drummond 1797-1840
The Oxford
Dictionary of Quotations, 2nd Ed. Revised, 1966
[189:24].
Life, liberty, and
property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary,
it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand
that caused men to make laws in the first place.
The Law,
Frederic Bastiat, Russell, Foundation for Economic Education, 1998,
pg. 2.
Each of us has a
natural right—from God—to defend his person, his liberty,
and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life,
and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon
the preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but
the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an
extension of our faculties?
If every person
has the right to defend—even by force—his person, his
liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have
the right to organize and support a common force to protect these
rights constantly. – Fredric Bastiat 1801-1850
The Law,
Frederic Bastiat, Russell, Foundation for Economic Education, 1998,
pg. 2.
John Locke, . . .insisted that whatsoever a person had “mixed his labor with and joined to it something that is his own” he thereby “makes his property.”
As God by virtue of being the Great Artificer was the Supreme Proprietor, so man in his lesser capacity had title to his own creation. To Adam Smith “the property which every man has in his labour” was “the original foundation of all other property”; to David Hume the convention existed “to bestow stability of possessions and to insure the peaceable enjoyment” of what one “may acquire by his fortune and industry;” to William Blackstone, the Great Commentator, it seemed that nothing “so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property.”
In [the New World]
America . . . liberty and property had been inseparable; liberty was
the means to the acquisition of property.
Encyclopedia of the
Social Sciences, MacMillan, 1933, PROPERTY,
Hamilton/Till, pg. 535.
No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session. - Mark Twain (1866)