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Land Ownership Quotes

Browse 20 quotes about Land Ownership.

Land Ownership Quotes

“Landed interets also successfully staged a fightback around this time by reviving the language of stewardship, and by claiming to be the voice of rural Britain. Older organisations like the NFU and CLA were joined by new lobby groups such as the Moorland Association and Countryside Alliance. These lobbyists still claim to speak for the countryside, despite most of them representing only tiny numbers of people with huge power and wealth: the 27,000 members of the CLA who own around a third of the land of England and Wales; the 150 or so grouse moor estates that that own at least half a million acres of the English uplands Even the 45,000 members of the NFU and the 100,000 who belong to the Countryside Alliance comprise but a small fraction of the rural population. By shouting loudly, they have occluded the fact that farming, forestry and fishing make up just 7 percent of employment even in rural areas of England. Across the UK as a whole, agriculture generates just 0.5 per cent of GDP and employs only 1.5 per cent of the workforce, yet takes up 71 per cent of the land. Land use decisions remain disproportionately dominated, therefore, by a small number of people.”

WealthEnglandAgricultureStewardshipLobbyingLand UseLand OwnershipLanded Interests
Book:The Lie of the Land
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“In the largest sense, the preservation/sagebrush processes outlined in this story are driven by three basic components of American culture: land ownership, independence, and individualism.”

IndependenceIndividualismAmerican HistoryPreservationAmerican CultureAmerican WestEnvironmental HistoryLand OwnershipFrontier ThesisSagebrush Rebellions
Book:Wilderness Preservation and the Sagebrush Rebellions
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“Ultimately, the most powerful way to rebalance the interests of private owners and the common good is by shifting the focus towards taxes on wealth - that is, asking those who have accummulated substantial assets down the years (or with inherited wealth, down the centuries) to make a fairer contribution. The case is indisputable: since 2008, average earnings have hardly risen, while the amount of wealth held by the better-off has sky-rocketed. Clearly paying for shocks such as the 2008 crash or the Covid-19 pandemic should not fall solely on those dependent on their immediate income. A Land Value Tax could also play an important role: a policy that would be difficult to evade, and would tackle the vast windfall profits that come from the development of land. It's an idea that has long enjoyed support from all sides of the political spectrum, including Winston Churchill, as well as from economists as divergent as Milton Friedman, Adam Smith and J.K. Galbraith. Given its elegant simplicity and essential fairness, the fact that it has not been introduced in England is a case-book example of the landowners' ability to block reform.”

Adam SmithWealth AccumulationWinston ChurchillLand OwnershipMilton FriedmanTaxation PolicyJ K GalbraithLand Value Taxation
Book:Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story
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“In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land values at tends of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism.”

American HistoryBlack HistoryUs HistoryKleptocracyInstitutional OppressionInstitutionalized RacismLand Ownership2001Slave Economy
Book:Un conto ancora aperto
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“Laws were made to establish a gradation of ranks; but it was soon found that the soil of America was opposed to a territorial aristocracy. To bring that refractory land into cultivation, the constant and interested exertions of the owner himself were necessary; and when the ground was prepared, its produce was found to be insufficient to enrich a proprietor and a farmer at the same time. The land was then naturally broken up into small portions, which the proprietor cultivated for himself. Land is the basis of an aristocracy, which clings to the soil that supports it; for it is not by privileges alone, nor by birth, but by landed property handed down from generation to generation, that an aristocracy is constituted. A nation may present immense fortunes and extreme wretchedness; but unless those fortunes are territorial, there is no true aristocracy, but simply the class of the rich and that of the poor.”

AristocracyLand Ownership1835Gentry
Book:Democracy in America
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“You're not content in your position as a factory owner and a rich heiress, you don't believe in your right to it, and now you can't sleep, which, of course, is certainly better than if you were content, slept soundly, and thought everything was fine. Your insomnia is respectable; in any event, it's a good sign. In fact, for our parents such a conversation as we're having now would have been unthinkable; they didn't talk at night, they slept soundly, but we, our generation, sleep badly, are anguished, talk a lot, and keep trying to decide if we're right or not. - A Medical Case”

ConscienceRussiaInheritanceGeneration GapLand Ownership
Book:Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov
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“The ownership of land is not natural. The American savage, ranging through forests who game and timber are the common benefits of all his kind, fails to comprehend it. The nomad traversing the desert does not ask to whom belong the shifting sands that extend around him as far as the horizon. The Caledonian shepherd leads his flock to graze wherever a patch of nutritious greenness shows amidst the heather. All of these recognise authority. They are not anarchists. They have chieftains and overlords to whom they are as romantically devoted as any European subject might be to a monarch. Nor do they hold as the first Christians did, that all land should be held in common. Rather, they do not consider it as a thing that can be parceled out. “We are not so innocent. When humanity first understood that a man’s strength could create good to be marketed, that a woman’s beauty was itself a commodity for trade, then slavery was born. So since Adam learnt to force the earth to feed him, fertile ground has become too profitable to be left in peace. “This vital stuff that lives beneath our feet is a treasury of all times. The past: it is packed with metals and sparkling stones, riches made by the work of aeons. The future: it contains seeds and eggs: tight-packed promises which will unfurl into wonders more fantastical than ever jeweller dreamed of -- the scuttling centipede, the many-branched tree whose roots, fumbling down into darkness, are as large and cunningly shaped as the boughs that toss in light. The present: it teems. At barely a spade’s depth the mouldy-warp travels beneath my feet: who can imagine what may live a fathom down? We cannot know for certain that the fables of serpents curving around roots of mighty trees, or of dragons guarding treasure in perpetual darkness, are without factual reality. “How can any man own a thing so volatile and so rich? Yet we followers of Cain have made of our world a great carpet, whose pieces can be lopped off and traded as though it were inert as tufted wool.”

EarthLandSlaveryTradeOwnershipNative AmericansLand Ownership
Book:Peculiar Ground
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“We all know who you are, Mr. Coughlin. Famous Yankee gangster. Friend of the colonel. It would be safer for a man to swim into the middle of the ocean and cut his own throat than to threaten you.' He solemnly made the sign of the cross. 'But when people starve and have nowhere to go, where would you have them end up?' 'Not on my land,' Joe said. 'But it is not your land. It's God's. You are renting it. This rum? This life?' He patted his chest. 'We are all just renting from God.”

LifeGodLandLand Ownership
Book:Live by Night
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“Show the people that our Old Nobility is not noble, that its lands are stolen lands - stolen either by force or fraud; show people that the title-deeds are rapine, murder, massacre, cheating, or court harlotry; dissolve the halo of divinity that surrounds the hereditary title; let the people clearly understand that our present House of Lords is composed largely of descendants of successful pirates and rogues; do these things and you will shatter the Romance that keeps the nation numb and spellbound while privilege picks its pocket.”

PrivilegeAristocracyHouse Of LordsLand Ownership
Book:Our Scots noble families
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“It is... difficult to dissociate Jamie's preoccupation with questions of land access and ownership from the fact that she is writing out of a country with one of the most unequal distributions of land ownership in Europe. Jamie has referred to 'the scandalous business of land ownership, especially in Scotland, where 80% of the land is owned by 10% of the people, and issues related to these imbalances often surface in her work. In a recent interview, Jamie remarked: 'I feel I might be striking a tiny blow: by getting out into thse places, and developing a language and a way of seeing that is not theirs but ours... It's the simplest act of resistance and renewal.”

ResistanceScotlandRenewalLand OwnershipKathleen JamiePublic Access
Book:Scottish Writing After Devolution: Edges of the New
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“I’m here to bear witness to what used to be here […] I know I must. I was out here before Ultimate Corp ran everything and everyone out into the desert and into the Red Eye. Then they hired many of us nomads to leave our way of life to earn a salary by planting. We were fools. ‘We let them convince us that we had nothing and our lands were useless. If it cannot make money, then it is worthless. That is not our culture, that is capitalism. Yet we still listened. We saw their big cities, we wanted all their nonsense things, we respected their big talk. We learned to prize money over things far more valuable. ‘This led to farmers’ letting Ultimate Corp buy their land. They were convinced they were getting something for nothing, the nothing being the land they’d been told was worthless. There was an element of fear, too. Fear of the big people from big faraway places. Goddamn, it was like rolling over and dying.”

Indigenous WisdomLand OwnershipDisability AwarenessAfrofuturismCapitalist Society
Book:Noor
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