A society divided into the rich who rule and the poor who obey cannot prosper.
True, it must be owned, we for the present, with our Mammon-Gospel, have come to strange conclusions. We call it a Society, and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness, but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named “fair competition” and so forth, it is a mutual hostility. We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings; we think, nothing doubting, that it absolves and liquidates all engagements of man. “My starving workers?” answers the rich Mill-owner: “Did not I hire them fairly in the market? Did I not pay them, to the last sixpence, the sum covenanted for? What have I to do with them more?”—Verily Mammon-worship is a melancholy creed. When Cain, for his own behoof, had killed Abel, and was questioned, “Where is thy brother” he too made answer, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Did I not pay my brother his wages, the thing he had merited from me?
— Carlyle
Because a human being can only live from the land and on the land, by making the land upon which he must exist the property of someone else, we make him as much a slave as if his flesh and blood were made the property of another. And ultimately, at a certain stage of social development, the slavery that results from the seizure of land, as a result of the fact that the relationship between the master and the slave are less direct and obvious, becomes even more cruel and more corrupting than the slavery that turns human bodies into property.
— Henry George
We have so many means of being happy, so many conveniences which our ancestors could not even imagine! And are we happy? If a minority is happier, then the majority is even more unhappy. By increasing the means of living for a small number of the rich, we force the majority to be and consider themselves unhappy. What kind of happiness could be acquired at the expense of the happiness of others?
— Rousseau
Let us imagine that I had saved a drowning man, but, before doing so, I had extorted a large part of his property. This, apparently, is quid pro quo. He values his life more than his property. But what would we say about a deal like that? And meanwhile, this is how people’s property is being taken away, because millions of people own either very little or next to nothing, and for their labor, i.e. for their property, they are given the means to exist.
— Salter
A tramp is a necessary supplement to a millionaire.
— Henry George
You cannot establish Christian brotherhood where ignorance, poverty, slavery and debauchery on the one hand, and culture, wealth and power on the other, are preventing people from respecting and loving each other.
— Mazzini
It is worse to be an oppressive master than an obedient slave. Do not feel burdened by poverty, feel burdened by extravagance.
If you are receiving a profit for which you did no work, then someone else is working for it without receiving it.
— Maimonides
