Henry George Quotes

#1. He who sees the truth, let him proclaim it, without asking who is for it or who is against it.

Henry George

#2. Progressive societies outgrow institutions as children outgrow clothes.

Henry George

#3. Private ownership of land is the nether mill-stone. Material progress is the upper mill-stone. Between them, with an increasing pressure, the working classes are being ground.

Henry George

#4. The people must think because the people alone can act.

Henry George

#5. There are people into whose heads it never enters to conceive of any better state of society than that which now exists.

Henry George

#6. A good, very good, not to say admirable schoolmaster, but then he is only a schoolmaster.

Henry George

#7. Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power.

Henry George

#8. How many men are there who fairly earn a million dollars?

Henry George

#9. Charity is false, futile, and poisonous when offered as a substitute for justice.

Henry George

#10. The value of a thing is the amount of laboring or work that its possession will save the possessor.

Henry George

#11. What would happen to the individual if all the functions of the body were placed under the control of the consciousness is what would happen to a nation in which all individual activities were directed by government.

Henry George

#12. What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power.

Henry George

#13. There is danger in reckless change, but greater danger in blind conservatism.

Henry George

#14. Passing into higher forms of desire, that which slumbered in the plant, and fitfully stirred in the beast, awakes in the man.

Henry George

#15. The methods by which a trade union can alone act, are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical.

Henry George

#16. How vainly shall we endeavor to repress crime by our barbarous punishment of the poorer class of criminals so long as children are reared in the brutalizing influences of poverty, so long as the bite of want drives men to crime.

Henry George

#17. God showers upon us his gifts-more than enough for all; But like swine scrambling for food, we tread them in the mire, and rend each other.

Henry George

#18. If you would have the slave show the virtues of the freeman, you must first make him free.

Henry George

#19. That which is unjust can really profit no one; that which is just can really harm no one.

Henry George

#20. As man is so constituted that it is utterly impossible for him to attain happiness save by seeking the happiness of others, so does it seem to be of the nature of things that individuals and classes can obtain their own just rights only by struggling for the rights of others.

Henry George

#21. Man must be doing something, or fancy that he is doing something, for in him throbs the creative impulse; the mere basker in the sunshine is not a natural, but an abnormal man.

Henry George

#22. Abolish all taxation save that upon land values.

Henry George

#23. So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.

Henry George

#24. Property in land is as indefensible as property in man.

Henry George

#25. There are three ways by which an individual can get wealth-by work, by gift, and by theft. And, clearly, the reasons why the workers get so little is that the beggars and thieves get so much.

Henry George

#26. Poverty is the openmouthed relentless hell which yawns beneath civilized society. And it is hell enough.

Henry George

#27. Everybody works but the vacant lot

Henry George

#28. How can a man be said to have a country when he has not right of a square inch of it.

Henry George

#29. No theory is too false, no fable too absurd, no superstition too degrading for acceptance when it has become embedded in common belief. Men will submit themselves to torture and to death, mothers will immolate [burn] their children at the bidding of beliefs they thus accept.

Henry George

#30. The tolerance of wrong dulls our sense of its injustice. Men may become accustomed to theft, murder, even to slavery - that sum of all villainies - so they see no injustice in it, yet that which is unjust is unjust still.

Henry George

#31. It is not from top to bottom that societies die; it is from bottom to top.

Henry George

#32. In all the new states of the Union, land monopolization has gone on at an alarming rate, but in none of them so fast as in California, and in none of them, perhaps, are the evil effects so manifest.

Henry George

#33. That amid our highest civilization men faint and die with want is not due to the niggardliness of nature, but to the injustice of man.

Henry George

#34. Man is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; the only animal that is never satisfied.

Henry George

#35. It is as to whether its services or uses are to be exchanged or not which makes a tool an article of capital or merely an article of wealth. Thus, the lathe of a manufacturer used in making things which are to be exchanged is capital, while the lathe kept by a gentleman for his own amusement is not.

Henry George

#36. One sex of voice in public matters, and that we could in no way so increase the attention , the intelligence and the devotion which may be brought to the solution of social problems as by enfranchising our women .

Henry George

#37. As it is with an individual, so it is with a nation. One must produce to have, or one will become a have-not.

Henry George

#38. The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in this world, and others no right.

Henry George

#39. Whoever becomes imbued with a noble idea kindles a flame from which other torches are lit, and influences those with whom he comes in contact, be they few or many. How far that influence, thus perpetuated, may extend, it is not given to him here to see.

Henry George

#40. The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.

Henry George

#41. The man who gives me employment, which I must have or suffer, that man is my master, let me call him what I will.

Henry George

#42. Capital is a result of labor, and is used by labor to assist it in further production. Labor is the active and initial force, and labor is therefore the employer of capital.

Henry George

#43. The protection of the masses has in all times been the pretense of tyranny - the plea of monarchy, of aristocracy, of special privilege of every kind. The slave owners justified slavery as protecting the slaves.

Henry George

#44. Compare society to a boat. Her progress through the water will not depend upon the exertion of her crew, but upon the exertion devoted to propelling her. This will be lessened by any expenditure of force in fighting among themselves, or in pulling in different directions.

Henry George

#45. No person, I think, ever saw a herd of buffalo, of which a few were fat and the great majority lean. No person ever saw a flock of birds, of which two or three were swimming in grease, and the others all skin and bone.

Henry George

#46. That alone is wise which is just; that alone is enduring which is right.

Henry George

#47. There can be to the ownership of anything no rightful title which is not derived from the title of the producer and does not rest upon the natural right of the man to himself.

Henry George

#48. Whence shall come the new barbarians? Go through the squalid quarters of great cities, and you may see, even now, their gathering hordes! How shall learning perish? Men will cease to read, and books will kindle fires and be turned into cartridges.

Henry George

#49. To prevent government from becoming corrupt and tyrannous, its organization and methods should be as simple as possible, its functions be restricted to those necessary to the common welfare, and in all its parts it should be kept as close to the people and as directly within their control as may be.

Henry George

#50. The word capital, as philologists trace it, comes down to us from a time when wealth was estimated in cattle, and a man's income depended upon the number of head he could keep for their increase.

Henry George

#51. Trade has ever been the extinguisher of war, the eradicator of prejudice, the diffuser of knowledge.

Henry George

#52. The state, it cannot too often be repeated, does nothing, and can give nothing, which it does not take from somebody.

Henry George

#53. Laissez faire (in its full true meaning) opens the way to the realization of the noble dreams of socialism.

Henry George

#54. The ideal social state is not that in which each gets an equal amount of wealth, but in which each gets in proportion to his contribution to the general stock.

Henry George

#55. Poorly paid labor is inefficient labor, the world over.

Henry George

#56. I do not think that any sorrow of youth or manhood equalled in intensity or duration the black and hopeless misery which followed the wrench of transference from a happy home to a school.

Henry George

#57. Social progress makes the well-being of all more and more the business of each.

Henry George