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Private ownership of land is the nether mill-stone. Material progress is the upper mill-stone. Between them, with an increasing pressure, the working classes are being ground.

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
Working
Material
Mill
Ground
Mills
Private
Upper
Pressure
Ownership
Materials
Increasing
Progress
Classes
Land
Stone
Class
Stones
Nether

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Property in land is as indefensible as property in man.
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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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How vainly shall we endeavor to repress crime by our barbarous punishment of the poorer class of criminals so long as children are reared in the brutalizing influences of poverty, so long as the bite of want drives men to crime.
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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.
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Laissez faire (in its full true meaning) opens the way to the realization of the noble dreams of socialism.
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There is danger in reckless change, but greater danger in blind conservatism.
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What would happen to the individual if all the functions of the body were placed under the control of the consciousness is what would happen to a nation in which all individual activities were directed by government.
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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
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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.
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How many men are there who fairly earn a million dollars?
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It is but a truism that labor is most productive where its wages are largest. Poorly paid labor is inefficient labor, the world over.
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Capital is a result of labor, and is used by labor to assist it in further production. Labor is the active and initial force, and labor is therefore the employer of capital.
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It is as to whether its services or uses are to be exchanged or not which makes a tool an article of capital or merely an article of wealth. Thus, the lathe of a manufacturer used in making things which are to be exchanged is capital, while the lathe kept by a gentleman for his own amusement is not.
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The value of a thing is the amount of laboring or work that its possession will save the possessor.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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