Property Seizure Quotes

You are advised that it has been determined necessary for the interest of the United States in the prosecution of the war that the property of Los Alamos Ranch School by acquired for military purposes.

We nor our bailiffs will take another man’s wood for Our castles or any other purpose without the owner’s consent.

Real and personal property of those who shall take up arms against the United States, or who shall be directly proven to have taken an active part with their enemies in the field, is declared confiscated to public use, and their slaves, if any they have, are hereby declared free men.

We must expropriate gently the private property on the state assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly. Let the owners of the immoveable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back.

We should like to see such legislation as would beggar the lot of them and confiscate their roads, lands, rolling stock and all that is theirs.... These men have set themselves apart—have divorced their interests from those of all other classes. They have deliberately antagonized civilization and affronted humanity. Their methods are so exceptional that they can be reached only by exceptional methods. They have presumed on our reluctance to apply them.

An expropriating property protector (the state, through taxation) is a contradiction in terms

The Freedmen's Bureau, that sacred charity of the Republic, was despoiled of its possessions for the sake of rebels, to whom their forfeited estates were given back after they had been vested by law in the United States. The proceeds of captured and abandoned property, lodged under the law in the national treasury, were ravished from their place of deposit and sacrificed. Rebels were allowed to fill the ante-chambers of the Executive Mansion and to enter into his counsels. The pardoning power was prostituted, and pardons were issued in lots to suit rebels.

When the good lord calls you home, the government ought not come get your home.

One of the specific powers and responsibilities of the federal government is to secure the borders. Property can be taken with due process of law and just compensation.

The exercise of the power of eminent domain is against common right. It subverts the usual attributes of the ownership of property.

The EPA must be forbidden to seize or destroy the property of any person until and unless such person has been found guilty of a crime in a court of law.

[The] fundamental principal of all just legislation [is] that the legislature shall not take the property of A and give it to B.

There is no security of property, where a despotic authority can possess itself of the property of the subject against his consent. Neither is there such security, where the consent is merely nominal and delusive.

The true rule for the military is to seize such property as is needed for military uses and reasons, and let the rest alone.

One would expect that private property taken by eminent domain would become land available for public use such as parks and roads. Unfortunately, this decision creates a loophole for government to manipulate the definition of public use simply to generate greater tax revenue.

The fifth amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees that no private property shall be taken for a public use without the payment of just compensation.

The workers and peasants must, as quickly as possible, seize everything that was created by them over many centuries and use it for their own interests.

Then also pretexts for seizing property are never wanting, and one who begins to live by rapine will always find some reason for taking the goods of others, whereas causes for taking life are rarer and more quickly destroyed.

Last Thursday, our Supreme Court backed that local governments can co-opt private property, and give it to another private entity, for economic development.

If the poor, for example, because they are more in number, divide among themselves the property of the rich,- is not this unjust? . . this law of confiscation clearly cannot be just.

I didn't say wonderful, I say eminent domain is something you need Chris. Eminent domain - if I build a highway - go ahead. I know exactly what you're saying. But if I build a highway, and if something's in the way of the highway, you're going to have to do something with that.

It is a well-settled principle of the international code that where one nation owes another a liquidated debt which it refuses or neglects to pay the aggrieved party may seize on the property belonging to the other, its citizens or subjects, sufficient to pay the debt without giving just cause of war.

My childhood memories include a time when the government confiscated my family's possessions and exiled us to a camp in the B.C. Interior, just because my grandparents were from Japan.

The establishment of an American Soviet government will involve the confiscation of large landed estates in town and country, and also, the whole body of forests, mineral deposits, lakes, rivers and so on.

The civil forfeiture law - if something so devoid of due process can be dignified as law - is an incentive for perverse behavior: Predatory government agencies get to pocket the proceeds from property they seize from Americans without even charging them with, let alone convicting them of, crimes. Criminals are treated better than this because they lose the fruits of their criminality only after being convicted.