Memorable lines
George wrote for readers, not only for economists, and some of his sentences have outlived the debates they were written for. Each one links to its paragraph, and each has its own page you can share.
The puzzle
“This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times.”
“It is as though an immense wedge were being forced, not underneath society, but through society.”
“Upon us is the responsibility of seeking the law, for in the very heart of our civilization to-day women faint and little children moan.”
“Political liberty, when the equal right to land is denied, becomes, as population increases and invention goes on, merely the liberty to compete for employment at starvation wages.”
The cause
“The increase of rent explains why wages and interest do not increase.”
“Like another Rip Van Winkle, he may have lain down and slept; still he is rich—not from anything he has done, but from the increase of population.”
“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.”
Justice
“Nature acknowledges no ownership or control in man save as the result of exertion.”
“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.”
The remedy
“We must make land common property.”
“It is not necessary to confiscate land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent.”
“To abolish these taxes would be to lift the whole enormous weight of taxation from productive industry.”
Progress and liberty
“Thus association in equality is the law of progress.”
“Whence shall come the new barbarians? Go through the squalid quarters of great cities, and you may see, even now, their gathering hordes!”
“For Liberty means Justice, and Justice is the natural law—the law of health and symmetry and strength, of fraternity and co-operation.”
“Where Liberty rises, there virtue grows, wealth increases, knowledge expands, invention multiplies human powers, and in strength and spirit the freer nation rises among her neighbors as Saul amid his brethren—taller and fairer.”
Hope
“The truth that I have tried to make clear will not find easy acceptance. If that could be, it would have been accepted long ago.”
“Freed, as I have tried to free her—in her own proper symmetry, Political Economy is radiant with hope.”
“But out of this inquiry has come to me something I did not think to find, and a faith that was dead revives.”