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No theory is too false, no fable too absurd, no superstition too degrading for acceptance when it has become embedded in common belief. Men will submit themselves to torture and to death, mothers will immolate [burn] their children at the bidding of beliefs they thus accept.

Henry George

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Henry George
Age: 58 †
Born: 1839
Born: September 2
Died: 1897
Died: October 29
Economist
Editor
Journalist
Philosopher
Politician
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Men
Theory
Torture
Degrading
Belief
Beliefs
Fables
Common
Absurd
Embedded
Faith
Acceptance
Superstition
Death
False
Superstitions
Mother
Thus
Submit
Become
Accept
Mothers
Fable
Children
Accepting
Burn
Bidding

More quotes by Henry George

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Blockading squadrons are a means whereby nations seek to prevent their enemies from trading protective tariffs are a means whereby nations attempt to prevent their own people from trading. What protectionism teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.
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Charity is false, futile, and poisonous when offered as a substitute for justice.
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How many men are there who fairly earn a million dollars?
Henry George
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My primary object is to defend and advance a principle in which I see the only possible relief from much that enthralls and degrades and distorts, turning light to darkness and good to evil, rather than to gage a philosopher or weigh a philosophy. Yet the examination I propose must lead to a decisive judgment upon both.
Henry George
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It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly.
Henry George
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The fundamental principle of human action, the law, that is to political economy what the law of gravitation is to physics is that men seek to gratify their desires with the least exertion
Henry George
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That which is unjust can really profit no one that which is just can really harm no one.
Henry George
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Abolish all taxation save that upon land values.
Henry George
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one sex of voice in public matters, and that we could in no way so increase the attention , the intelligence and the devotion which may be brought to the solution of social problems as by enfranchising our women .
Henry George
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Unless there be correct thought, there cannot be any action, and when there is correct thought, right action will follow.
Henry George
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A good, very good, not to say admirable schoolmaster, but then he is only a schoolmaster.
Henry George
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Man must be doing something, or fancy that he is doing something, for in him throbs the creative impulse the mere basker in the sunshine is not a natural, but an abnormal man.
Henry George
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As it becomes more and more difficult to get land, so will the virtual enslavement of the laboring-classe s go on. As the value of land rises, more and more of the earnings of labor will be demanded for the use of land, until finally nothing is left to laborers but the wages of slavery -- a bare living.
Henry George
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The ideal social state is not that in which each gets an equal amount of wealth, but in which each gets in proportion to his contribution to the general stock.
Henry George
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There can be to the ownership of anything no rightful title which is not derived from the title of the producer and does not rest upon the natural right of the man to himself.
Henry George
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Passing into higher forms of desire, that which slumbered in the plant, and fitfully stirred in the beast, awakes in the man.
Henry George
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So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.
Henry George
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The tolerance of wrong dulls our sense of its injustice. Men may become accustomed to theft, murder, even to slavery - that sum of all villainies - so they see no injustice in it, yet that which is unjust is unjust still.
Henry George
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The value of a thing is the amount of laboring or work that its possession will save the possessor.
Henry George
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Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power.
Henry George