Common Property Quotes

“the greater the number of owners, the less the respect for common property. People are much more careful of their personal possessions than of those owned communally; they exercise care over common property only in so far as they are personally affected.”
― Aristotle, Politics

“Getting through life without a lot of money, possessions, and/or friends is admirable, especially if it is by choice.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Naturally there was the notion of private property as a pragmatic concept, for individuals or groups have a proclivity to tend to their own possessions with greater care and reverence than they would to common property...in such cases, the notion of ownership would underscore a relationship existing between distinct people, rather than a legal association between a person and that which is said to be possessed, which is to say that ownership was, in its strictest definition, the societal distinction between the owner and the non-owner with respect to the property in question. Beyond this, the concept of ownership varied further from society-to-society according to their respective derivations of natural law, legal positivism and legal realism. Some societies—the indigenous Itako tribes...for example—railed against their governments’ initiatives for private ownership in favor of maintaining equal access to available resources (in the case of the Itako, this was due primarily to the fact that theirs were kin-based tribes whose membership sought to live communally). All the same, even this notion of common possession seemed to me rather arrogant, for the necessitated existence of a public domain was rooted in the shared human dominance over the objects or organisms in question. And so, in my dizzying contemplation, I began to yearn for a greater law that stretched to vast limits beyond that which governed humanity alone. The voice in my mind spoke earnestly of the need for a unifying jurisprudence which could preside over all of Nature’s manifestations in a manner either probabilistically fair or mathematically arbitrary. And perhaps, still, this would not be enough.”
― Ashim Shanker, Only the Deplorable

“When men say, for instance (by a false metaphor), that each member of the public should feel himself an owner of public property – such as a Town Park – and should therefore respect it as his own, they are saying something which all our experience proves to be completely false. No man feels of public property that it is his own; no man will treat it with the care or the affection of a thing which is his own; still less can a man express himself through the use of a thing which is not his own, but shared in common with a mass of other men.”
― Hilaire Belloc, An Essay on the Restoration of Property

“Private property does not discriminate. It torments even those who own property.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“There is no precept of the natural law commanding men to appropriate all things in such a way that each person is assigned his own separate portion...it nonetheless left it up to men's judgement whether to make all things proper or only certain ones, and whether to possess some things in common while leaving the rest available to all, yet in such a way that no one could claim them for himself alone. And so the law of nature is understood to approve all agreements men have introduced concerning things, provided they do not involve a contradiction or disturb society.”
― Peter Vallentyne, The Origins of Left-Libertarianism: An Anthology of Historical Writings