"To inherit property is not to be..." - Quote by Henry David Thoreau

“If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly.... You are paid for being something less than a man. The state does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. Even the poet laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe of wine; and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe.”

“Compared with this simple, fibrous life, our civilized history appears the chronicle of debility, of fashion, and the arts of luxury. But the civilized man misses no real refinement in the poetry of the rudest era. It reminds him that civilization does but dress men. It makes shoes, but it does not toughen the soles of the feet. It makes cloth of finer texture, but it does not touch the skin. Inside the civilized man stands the savage still in the place of honor. We are those blue-eyed, yellow-haired Saxons, those slender, dark-haired Normans.”

“The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it.”

“As property, honestly obtained, is best secured by an equality of rights, so ill-gotten property depends for protection on a monopoly of rights. He who has robbed another of his property, will next endeavor to disarm him of his rights, to secure that property; for when the robber becomes the legislator he believes himself secure.”

“The whole constitution of property on its present tenures, is injurious, and its influence on persons deteriorating and degrading.”

“Every proprietor owes to the community a ground-rent for the land which he holds.”

“Money and goods are certainly the best of references.”

“The man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the state because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government.”

“One who knew how to appropriate the true value of this world would be the poorest man in it. The poor rich man! all he has is whathe has bought.”