Top 70 Henry George Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Social progress makes the well-being of all more and more the business of each.”

— Henry George

2. “As no man made the land, so no man can claim a right of ownership in the land.”

— Henry George

3. “Trade has ever been the extinguisher of war, the eradicator of prejudice, the diffuser of knowledge.”

— Henry George

4. “What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power.”

— Henry George

5. “There are three ways by which an individual can get wealth-by work, by gift, and by theft. And, clearly, the reasons why the workers get so little is that the beggars and thieves get so much.”

— Henry George

6. “Progressive societies outgrow institutions as children outgrow clothes.”

— Henry George

7. “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

8. “Everybody works but the vacant lot.”

— Henry George

9. “What protectionism teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.”

— Henry George

10. “No person, I think, ever saw a herd of buffalo, of which a few were fat and the great majority lean. No person ever saw a flock of birds, of which two or three were swimming in grease, and the others all skin and bone.”

— Henry George

11. “Charity is false, futile, and poisonous when offered as a substitute for justice.”

— Henry George

12. “Unless there be correct thought, there cannot be any action, and when there is correct thought, right action will follow.”

— Henry George

13. “For every social wrong there must be a remedy. But the remedy can be nothing less than the abolition of the wrong.”

— Henry George

14. “The state, it cannot too often be repeated, does nothing, and can give nothing, which it does not take from somebody.”

— Henry George

15. “Man is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; the only animal that is never satisfied.”

— Henry George

16. “The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in this world, and others no right.”

— Henry George

17. “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

18. “The protection of the masses has in all times been the pretense of tyranny – the plea of monarchy, of aristocracy, of special privilege of every kind. The slave owners justified slavery as protecting the slaves.”

— Henry George

19. “I propose to beg no question to shrink from no conclusion, but to follow truth wherever it may lead.”

— Henry George

20. “There is danger in reckless change, but greater danger in blind conservatism.”

— Henry George

21. “He who sees the truth, let him proclaim it, without asking who is for it or who is against it.”

— Henry George

22. “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

23. “The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.”

— Henry George

24. “Compare society to a boat. Her progress through the water will not depend upon the exertion of her crew, but upon the exertion devoted to propelling her. This will be lessened by any expenditure of force in fighting among themselves, or in pulling in different directions.”

— Henry George

25. “How many men are there who fairly earn a million dollars?”

— Henry George

26. “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

27. “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

28. “To prevent government from becoming corrupt and tyrannous, its organization and methods should be as simple as possible, its functions be restricted to those necessary to the common welfare, and in all its parts it should be kept as close to the people and as directly within their control as may be.”

— Henry George

29. “The people must think because the people alone can act.”

— Henry George

30. “That amid our highest civilization men faint and die with want is not due to the niggardliness of nature, but to the injustice of man.”

— Henry George

31. “That which is unjust can really profit no one; that which is just can really harm no one.”

— Henry George

32. “How can a man be said to have a country when he has not right of a square inch of it.”

— Henry George

33. “In all the new states of the Union, land monopolization has gone on at an alarming rate, but in none of them so fast as in California, and in none of them, perhaps, are the evil effects so manifest.”

— Henry George

34. “Property in land is as indefensible as property in man.”

— Henry George

35. “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

36. “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.”

— Henry George

37. “Material progress does not merely fail to relieve poverty, it actually produces it. This association of progress with poverty is the great enigma of our times. It is the riddle that the sphinx of fate puts to our civilization. And which NOT to answer is to be destroyed.”

— Henry George

38. “God showers upon us his gifts-more than enough for all; But like swine scrambling for food, we tread them in the mire, and rend each other.”

— Henry George

39. “The word capital, as philologists trace it, comes down to us from a time when wealth was estimated in cattle, and a man’s income depended upon the number of head he could keep for their increase.”

— Henry George

40. “The great cause of inequality in the distribution of wealth is inequality in the ownership of land. The ownership of land is the great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the social, the political, and consequently the intellectual and moral condition of a people.”

— Henry George

41. “Let no man imagine that he has no influence.”

— Henry George

42. “Whoever becomes imbued with a noble idea kindles a flame from which other torches are lit, and influences those with whom he comes in contact, be they few or many. How far that influence, thus perpetuated, may extend, it is not given to him here to see.”

— Henry George

43. “If you would have the slave show the virtues of the freeman, you must first make him free.”

— Henry George

44. “Poverty is the openmouthed relentless hell which yawns beneath civilized society. And it is hell enough.”

— Henry George

45. “Capital is but a form of labor, and its distinction from labor is in reality but a subdivision, just as the division of labor into skilled and unskilled would be.”

— Henry George

46. “We speak of Liberty as one thing, and of virtue, wealth, knowledge, invention, national strength, and national independence as other things. But, of all these, Liberty is the source, the mother, the necessary condition.”

— Henry George

47. “Passing into higher forms of desire, that which slumbered in the plant, and fitfully stirred in the beast, awakes in the man.”

— Henry George

48. “We have made, and still are making, enormous advances on material lines. It is necessary that we commensurately advance on moral lines. Civilization, as it progresses, requires a higher conscience, a keener sense of justice, a warmer brotherhood, a wider, loftier, truer public spirit.”

— Henry George

49. “I ask no one who may read this book to accept my views. I ask him to think for himself.”

— Henry George

50. “There is this difference where a man works for himself, or where, when working for an employer, he takes his wages in kind, his wages depend upon the result of his labor. Should that, from any misadventure, prove futile, he gets nothing. When he works for an employer, however, he gets his wages anyhow – they depend upon the performance of the labor, not upon the result of the labor.”

— Henry George