Quotes about Theft

"Property in ideas is an insoluble contradiction.  [He who complains of "theft" of his idea] complains that something has been stolen which he still possesses, and he wants back something which, if given to him a thousand times, would add nothing to his possession."

Do not steal something that already belongs to you or pine for people who are sitting right next to you.

I can only think of one thing worse than having all of my stuff stolen. And that is having some of it returned.

The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit. In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the hidden confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.

At times some people use force or fraud to take from others without willful, voluntary consent. Normally, the initiation of force to take life is murder, to take liberty is slavery, and to take property is theft. It is the same whether these actions are done by one person acting alone, by the many acting against a few, or even by officials with fine hats and titles.

Granted the endless variations of moral customs, still the essential standards persist. As in a scientific laboratory, all else may change but the standards are unalterable- disinterested love of truth, fidelity to facts, accuracy in measurement, exactness of verification-so, in life as a whole, the towering ethical criteria remain unshaken. Falsehood is never better than truth, theft better than than honesty, treachery better than loyalty, cowardice better than courage.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

That from the heart come good thoughts and bad thoughts is the message of the Savior. By the right choice, and through application of thought, man ascends to divine perfection; by the abuse and wrong application of thought, he descends below the level of the beasts. Between these two extremes are all the grades of character and man in their maker and master. Jesus taught that from within the heart of man come evil thoughts, sexual vice, acts of theft, murder, adultery, greed. When men commit these crimes individually or collectively, they trespass upon human rights and, of course, bring misery into the world. A noble and godlike character is no thing of favor or chance, but is a natural result of continued effort and right thinking, the effect of long cherished associations with godlike thoughts.

The method of "postulating" what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.

PLUNDER, v. To take the property of another without observing the decent and customary reticences of theft. To wrest the wealth of A from B and leave C lamenting a vanishing opportunity.