“Thieves respect property; they merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.”

“We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fulness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people's.”

“What is it about it, anyway? Stealing.’ ‘It’s …’ It’s an instinct, I want to say. ... It’s art. But she would not understand, so I merely repeat the old joke. ‘It’s about respecting other people’s property. I make it my property so that I can properly respect it.”

“the greater the number of owners, the less the respect for common property. People are much more careful of their personal possessions than of those owned communally; they exercise care over common property only in so far as they are personally affected.”

“To claim that theft or adultery or lying are "evil" simply reflects our degraded idea of good-—that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity. ”

“As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.”