“Any property taken away from others, whether by stealth, fraud or violence, must be wrong: but to take away men themselves, and keep them in slavery, must be worse.”

“Furniture or gold can be taken away from you, but knowledge and a new language can easily be taken from one place to the other, and nobody can take them away from you.”

“Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.”

“If we would have civilization and the exertion indispensable to its success, we must have property; if we have property, we must have its rights; if we have the rights of property, we must take those consequences of the rights of property which are inseparable from the rights themselves.”

“I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians wereselfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”

“Faithfulness! I must analyze it some day. The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.”