Quotes About Ownership

The ownership of land is an odd thing when you come to think of it. How deep, after all, can it go? If a person owns a piece of land, does he own it all the way down, in ever narrowing dimensions, till it meets all other pieces at the center of the earth? Or does ownership consist only of a thin crust under which the friendly worms have never heard of trespassing?

Sometimes people say to me, "I want to write, but I have five kids, a full-time job, a wife who beats me, a tremendous debt to my parents," and so on. I say to them, "There is no excuse. If you want to write, write. This is your life. You are responsible for it. You will not live forever. Don't wait. Make the time now, even if it is ten minutes once a week.

Let yourself live in something that is already rightfully yours—your own wild mind.

Own anything you want in your writing and then let it go.

This is your life. You are responsible for it. You will not live forever. Don't wait.

What we call real estate—the solid ground to build a house on—is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests.

Men live by rules they've made for themselves. And among those rules is one specifying that women are merely commodities for men to possess. A daughter belongs to her father, a wife to her husband. A woman's own desires present obstacles for men and are best ignored.

All human populations are in some sense immigrants. All hostility between different cultures in one place has an aspect of the classic immigrant grudge against the next boatload approaching the shore. To defend one's home and fields and ancestral graves against invasion seems a right. But to claim unique possession – to compound the fact of settlement with the aspect of a landscape into an abstract of eternal and immutable ownership – is a joke.

When you have a chest of jewels, you don't walk around it. You plant yourself on the lid with a weapon in your hand.

Slaves, whose legal status was comparable to that of livestock, were expected to provide a farm owner with marketable children.

To own a slave was to have a license for libertine behavior, because sexual violation was intrinsic to slavery. The slaveowner had the full legal right to do with his property as he saw fit

When we speak of "branding" today, we should remember that it was at one time literal: with a hot iron pressed against human flesh.

According to the detailed US census of 1860, which enumerated slaves and slaveholders in its "Agriculture" supplement, the 347,525 owners of one or more slaves constituted only 4.3 percent of the 8,039,000 "whites" in the fifteen slaveholding states (eleven of which would shortly secede) and 2.86 percent of the population of those states as a whole.

Perhaps one-half of 1 percent of the population of the slaveholding states owned a hundred slaves or more, and a few owned a thousand or more. It has been suggested that the 1860 census numbers might have underreported large slaveowners, but it's unlikely that large slaveholders—again, almost the entire political class of the South—amounted to even 1 percent of the population of their states.

Land was to the nomads what a deity is to the initiated: one may draw on its might, but not lay claim to it. Amma herdsmen roamed the vast steppe at will in search of a green pasture and watering hole, with little regard for man-made boundaries. They questioned why a settled society should behave any differently, why one man should toil in the service of another merely because the stronger had staked out something that had never belonged to him in the first place.

You are intelligent, you are diplomatic, you are beautiful, and you are and always will be...[he kisses her]...MINE...

What you own is your own kingdom / What you do is your own glory / What you love is your own power / What you live is your own story

There being no international copyright laws, "pirated" editions abounded, with no complaint from the public, or much from authors, who were lionized.

Lethargy is evident in churches when the people have no sense of ownership.

A man is not a man until he has a house of his own.

The secret to success is to own nothing, but control everything.

It ain't gonna happen. You get a lot to learn about ranchers. We defend what's ours. From varmints and the goddam Park Service.

To name a thing was to own, control and understand it.

Now, finally, the earth was hers with no taint of Heaven.