Land, like air and sunlight, belongs to everyone and cannot be the object of private ownership.
You are all strangers in this world. Go north, south, west or east—wherever you stop you will find a man who will drive you away, saying: “This is my land.” And, having passed through all the countries of the world, you will return, having discovered that there is not a paltry piece of land anywhere where your wife could give birth, where you could stay and cultivate the earth, and where your children could bury your bones.
— Lamennais
To drop a man in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and tell him he is at liberty to walk ashore, would not be more bitter irony than to place a man where all the land is appropriated as the property of other people and to tell him that he is a free man, at liberty to work for himself and to enjoy his own earnings.
— Henry George
Landed monopoly has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance.
— Thomas Paine
Place one hundred men on an island from which there is no escape, and whether you make one of these men the absolute owner of the other ninety-nine, or the absolute owner of the soil of the island, will make no difference either to him or to them.
— Henry George
And is not this a slavery, say the people, that though there be land enough in England to maintain ten times as many people as are in it, yet some must beg of their bretheren, or work in hard drudgery for day wages for them, or starve, or steal, and so be hanged out of the way, as men not fit to live on the Earth?
— Gerrard Winstanley
The land question means hunger, thirst, nakedness, notice to quit, labour spent in vain, the toil of years seized upon, the breaking up of homes; the misery, sickness, deaths of parent, children, wives; the despair and wildness which spring up in the hearts of the poor, when legal force, like a sharp harrow, goes over the most sensitive and vital rights of mankind. All this is contained in the land question.
— Cardinal Manning
The one who owns more land than is necessary for him to feed himself and his family is not only a participant, but also a culprit of the poverty and misery and the degradation suffered by the masses.
