Origin of Rights

we must believe that men had naturally no right to pick up cockles on the beach, or gather berries from the hedge-no right to cultivate the earth, to invent and make comfortable clothing, to use instruments to provide more easily for their enjoyments-no right to improve and adorn their habitations-nay, no right to have habitations-no right to buy or sell, or move from place to place-till the benevolent and wise law-giver conferred all these rights on them.  If the principle be true in one case it must be universally true; and, according to it, parents had no right to love and respect their offspring, and infants no right to draw nourishment from the breast of their mothers, until the legislator-foreseeing, fore calculating the immense advantages to the human race of establishing the long list of rights and duties which grow out of our affections, and constitute our happiness-had established them by his decree.

Thomas Hodgskin, The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted, 1832

China's Private Enterprises

The diversity of production, commodity economy, and all sorts of small enterprises boomed in the countryside, as if a strange army had appeared suddenly from nowhere. This is not the achievement of our central government.

Deng Xiaoping, People's Daily, 13 June 1987

Conduct

though I disapprove of how you conduct your life, as long as you do not violate the property boundaries of others, I shall defend to the death your right to act as you choose

Butler Shaffer, Boundaries of Order, 2009

Eager Trespass

We eagerly trespass one another's property interests out of an arrogance that threatens to destroy human society, if not humanity itself.

Butler Shaffer (Boundaries of Order 2009)

How to Destroy a Book

Anyone who claims that readers can’t and won’t and shouldn’t own their books are bent on the destruction of the book, the destruction of publishing, and the destruction of authorship itself.

 Cory Doctorow