From one great to another!
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“Mrs Anna George de Mille has received two letters from Albert Einstein. The first reads as follows:
I thank you for your great friendliness. I have already read Henry George’s great book and really learnt a great deal from it. Yesterday evening I read with admiration—the address about Moses. Men like Henry George are rare unfortunately. One cannot imagine a more beautiful combination of intellectual keenness, artistic form and fervent love of justice. Every line is written as if for our generation. The spreading of these works is a really deserving cause, for our generation especially has many and important things to learn from Henry George.
With friendly greetings,
A. Einstein
The second letter came in answer to her request for permission to make public the first and may thus be translated from the German:
I give you according to your request, permission to publish my letter on the work of Henry George although well know I am no expert in this field and that my judgment therefore is not of great importance. It almost seems to me as if you had no conception to what high degree the work of Henry George is appreciated by serious, thinking people.
The statement sent concerning the cooperation of America and England in foreign policies interests me very much. A short time ago President Butler of Columbia University, gave expression to the same thought which I often come in contact with, in English men of politics. This statement (of Henry George), is a new proof to me of the extraordinary foresight of this great personality.
With very great respect,
A. Einstein”
[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, May-June, 1934]
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#seethecat#savetheworld#georgism#henrygeorge#alberteinstein#einstein#wearerent#sharetherents#savetheplanet#nature#freedom#justice#peace#love#equality#wealthinequality#climatechange#politics#economics#philosophy#ethics#morality#art#design#protest#disobey#quotation#quote#quotes#quoteoftheday
“But while a man who chooses to be poor cannot be charged with crime, it is certainly a crime to force poverty on others. And it seems to me clear that the great majority of those who suffer from poverty are poor not from their own particular faults, but because of conditions imposed by society at large. Therefore I hold that poverty is a crime—not an individual crime, but a social crime, a crime for which we all, poor as well as rich, are responsible.”
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“The curse born of poverty is not confined to the poor alone; it runs through all classes, even to the very rich. They, too, suffer; they must suffer; for there cannot be suffering in a community from which any class can totally escape. The vice, the crime, the ignorance, the meanness born of poverty, poison, so to speak, the very air which rich and poor alike must breathe.”
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“I hold, and I think no one who looks at the facts can fail to see, that poverty is utterly unnecessary. It is not by the decree of the Almighty, but it is because of our own injustice, our own selfishness, our own ignorance, that this scourge, worse than any pestilence, ravages our civilisation, bringing want and suffering and degradation, destroying souls as well as bodies.”
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“Nine tenths of human misery, I think you will find, if you look, to be due to poverty.”
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“If men cannot find an employer, why cannot they employ themselves? Simply because they are shut out from the element on which human labour can alone be exerted. Men are compelled to compete with each other for the wages of an employer, because they have been robbed of the natural opportunities of employing themselves; because they cannot find a piece of God's world on which to work without paying some other human creature for the privilege.”
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Above are some quotations from one of my favorite speeches, The Crime of Poverty, by Henry George.
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#seethecat#savetheworld#georgism#poverty#henrygeorge#wearerent#sharetherents#savetheplanet#nature#freedom#justice#peace#love#equality#wealthinequality#climatechange#politics#economics#philosophy#ethics#morality#art#streetart#graffiti#design#wheatpaste#protest#disobey#land#labor