Public Property Quotes

“At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only,—when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walking

“Some people are born to be public property.”
― M.F. Moonzajer

“When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“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

“One of the founding European settlements of what would become the United States, Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts, first attempted communal farming on the “assumption that it was the most fitting economic arrangement for a unified religious community. Growing hungry and despairing of the experiment, however, the settlers soon switched to individual family plots, which proved far more fruitful. As the governor of the colony observed, the farmers were far more industrious in tending family plots than they were working the communal grounds. The lesson would be relearned, with a much higher body count, by communist regimes in the twentieth century after their attempts at collective farming.”
― Todd Seavey, Libertarianism For Beginners