Real Estate

"This land is your land, this land is my land From California to the New York Island From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters This land is made for you and me."

"Happiness is... ...land"

"This land is the house we have always lived in"

"The emigration should be voluntary, for it would be as cruel as unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers and seek a home in a distant land. But they should be distinctly informed that if they remain within the limits of the States they must be subject to their laws. In return for their obedience as individuals they will without doubt be protected in the enjoyment of those possessions which they have improved by their industry. But it seems to me visionary to suppose that in this state of things claims can be allowed on tracts of country on which they have neither dwelt nor made improvements, merely because they have seen them from the mountain or passed them in the chase."

"Our system is to live in perpetual peace with the Indians, to cultivate an affectionate attachment from them, by everything just and liberal which we can do for them within the bounds of reason, and by giving them effectual protection against wrongs from our own people. The decrease of game rendering their subsistence by hunting insufficient, we wish to draw them to agriculture, to spinning and weaving. The latter branches they take up with great readiness, because they fall to women, who gain by quitting the labors of the field for those which are exercised within doors. When they withdraw themselves to the culture of a small piece of land, they will perceive how useless to them are their extensive forests, and will be willing to pare them off from time to time in exchange for necessaries for their farms and families. To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading uses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands."

"Look at the legacy of poor Eve's exile from Eden: the land shows the bruises of an abusive relationship. It’s not just land that is broken, but more importantly, our relationship to land."

"The federal government's Indian Removal policies wrenched many Native peoples from our homelands. It separated us from our traditional knowledge and lifeways, the bones of our ancestors, our sustaining plants—but even this did not extinguish identity. So the government tried a new tool, separating children from their families and cultures, sending them far away to school, long enough, they hoped, to make them forget who they were. [...] Children, language, lands: almost everything was stripped away, stolen when you weren't looking because you were trying to stay alive. In the face of such loss, one thing our people could not surrender was the meaning of land. In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could never be bought or sold. These are the meanings people took with them when they were forced from their ancient homelands to new places. Whether it was their homeland or the new land forced upon them, land held in common gave people strength; it gave them something to fight for. And so—in the eyes of the federal government—that belief was a threat."

"The land knows you, even when you are lost."

"The truth of our relationship with the soil is written more clearly on the land than in any book."

"If we allow traditions to die, relationships to fade, the land will suffer."

"What’s good for the land is also good for the people."

"The land is the real teacher. All we need as students is mindfulness."

"It is an odd dichotomy we have set for ourselves, between loving people and loving land. We know that loving a person has agency and power—we know it can change everything. Yet we act as if loving the land is an internal affair that has no energy outside the confines of our head and heart."

"The story of our relationship to the earth is written more truthfully on the land than on the page. It lasts there. The land remembers what we said and what we did. Stories are among our most potent tools for restoring the land as well as our relationship to land. We need to unearth the old stories that live in a place and begin to create new ones, for we are storymakers, not just storytellers. All stories are connected, new ones woven from the threads of the old."

"If one cousin buys land, the other cousin gets a stomachache."

"The Lord spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, saying, ... "The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine. For you are strangers and sojourners with me.""

"The fate of North American Indian tribes frequently resembled that of the Australian Aborigines. European settlers arrived on their native territories and claimed the land for their own. When the Indians resisted, the settlers, supported by their colonial governments, or their national, state, and local governments, were quick to drive out or kill the Indians and their families or to force them onto reservations to live out their lives in alien surroundings. As in the case of the Aborigines, children were taken from Indian families, women were kidnapped and raped, promises of peace were made and broken, and claims of racial and civilizational superiority were used by the settlers to justify their land grabbing and their killing. North American native peoples, like the Aborigines, were highly susceptible to the diseases brought to their homelands by the settlers and prone to the abuse of alcohol, which the settlers purposely employed to undermine their ability to resist. Those settlers who raised livestock, primarily cows and sheep, tended to have the sharpest conlicts with the Indians, provoking massacres and outright warfare between Indian tribes and government and militia formations. The tendency of the North American settlers to see the Indians as hopelessly primitive and incapable of marshaling the resources of the land gave them “reason” to deprive those Indians of the most desirable lands and territories."

"After millennia of Native history, and centuries of displacement and dispossession, acknowledging original Indigenous inhabitants is complex. Many places in the Americas have been home to different Native Nations over time, and many Indigenous people no longer live on lands to which they have ancestral ties. Even so, Native Nations, communities, families, and individuals today sustain their sense of belonging to ancestral homelands and protect these connections through Indigenous languages, oral traditions, ceremonies, and other forms of cultural expression."

"Men did not make the earth. ... It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. ... Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds."

"The land and all it contains, without which labor cannot be exerted, belong to no one man, but to all alike."

"Nor was thy Lord the one to destroy a land until He had sent to its centre an apostle, rehearsing to them Our Signs; nor are We going to destroy a land except when its inhabitants practise iniquity. The (material) things which ye are given are but the conveniences of this life and the glitter thereof; but that which is with Allah is better and more enduring: will ye not then be wise? Are (these two) alike?- one to whom We have made a goodly promise, and who is going to reach its (fulfilment), and one to whom We have given the good things of this life, but who, on the Day of Judgment, is to be among those brought up (for punishment)?"

"Buy land. They ain't making any more of the stuff."

"The first man who, having fenced off a plot of land, thought of saying, 'This is mine' and found people simple enough to believe him was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors might the human race have been spared by the one who, upon pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his fellow men: 'Beware of listening to this imposter; you are lost if you forget the fruits of the earth belong to all and that the earth belongs to no one.'"

"The white men aren't friends to the Indians... At first they only asked for land sufficient for a wigwam; now, nothing will satisfy them but the whole of our hunting grounds from the rising to the setting sun."

"La tierra es de quien la trabaja con sus manos."

"When the hornet hangs in the hollyhock, And the brown bee drones i' the rose, And the west is a red-streaked four-o'clock, And summer is near its close— It's—Oh, for the gate, and the locust lane; And dusk, and dew, and home again!"

"At length his lonely cot appears in view, Beneath the shelter of an aged tree; Th' expectant wee-things, toddlin, stacher thro' To meet their Dad, wi' flichterin noise an' glee."

"Sitting with my gin or whisky afterwards I would often manage to get into conversation with some lonely man or other – usually an exile like myself – and the talk would be about the world, air-routes and shipping-lines, drinking-places thousands of miles away. Then I felt happy, felt I had come home, because home to people like me is not a place but all places, all places except the one we happen to be in at the moment."

"To homes pervaded by charm, as to works of Art that approach perfection, the more happily constituted minds say 'Yes' without any qualification. The proper homage due to them is absolute assent."

"Home is where the heart is."

"They dreamt not of a perishable home."

"There is no happiness in life, there is no misery like that growing out of the dispositions which consecrate or desecrate a home."

"When home is ruled according to God's word, angels might be asked to stay a night with us, and they would not find themselves out of their element."

"In the homes of America are born the children of America; and from them go out into American life, American men and women. They go out with the stamp of these homes upon them; and only as these homes are what they should be, will they be what they should be."

"The strength of a nation, especially of a republican nation, is in the intelligent and well-ordered homes of the people."

"A Christian home! What a power it is to the child when he is far away in the cold, tempting world, and voices of sin are filling his ears, and his feet stand on slippery places."

"The spirit and tone of your home will have great influence on your children. If it is what it ought to be, it will fasten conviction on their minds, however wicked they may become."

"The pleasant converse of the fireside, the simple songs of home, the words of encouragement as I bend over my school - tasks, the kiss as I lie down to rest, the patient bearing with the freaks of my restless nature, the gentle counsels mingled with reproofs and approvals, the sympathy that meets and assuages every sorrow, and sweetens every little success — all these return to me amid the responsibilities which press upon me now, and I feel as if I had once lived in heaven, and, straying, had lost my way."

"I never heard my father's or mother's voice once raised in any question with each other; nor saw any angry or even slightly hurt or offended glance in the eyes of either. I never heard a servant scolded, nor even suddenly, passionately, or in any severe manner, blamed; and I never saw a moment's trouble or disorder in any household matter."

"It is to Jesus Christ we owe the truth, the tenderness, the purity, the warm affection, the holy aspiration, which go together in that endearing word — home; for it is He who has made obedience so beautiful, and affection so holy; it is He who has brought the Father's home so near, and has taught us that love is of God."

"The sweetest type of heaven is home — nay, heaven is the home for whose acquisition we are to strive the most strongly. Home, in one form and another, is the great object of life. It stands at the end of every day's labor, and beckons us to its bosom; and life would be cheerless and meaningless, did we not discern across the river that divides us from the life beyond, glimpses of the pleasant mansions prepared for us."

"The home came from heaven. Modeled on the Father's house and the many mansions, and meant the one to be a training place for the other, the home is one of the gifts of the Lord Jesus — a special creation of Christianity."

"Keep the home near heaven. Let it face toward the Father's house. Not only let the day begin and end with God, with mercies acknowledged and forgiveness sought, but let it be seen and felt that God is your chiefest joy, His will in all you do the absolute and sufficient reason."

"It was Jesus Christ who, ever pointing to joys which do not perish in the using, wedded duty to delight, and re-opening to the Christian family a better paradise — the Father's house — placed the earthly home in the vestibule of heaven."

"The ascension of Christ makes heaven seem homelike to us as we journey toward it; for Jesus wears our humanity at the right hand of the Father."

"Home and Jesus! The two should be inseparable. Husband and wife need the clasp of that infinite love to keep their hearts true to each other. Parents need the guidance of that infinite wisdom and the power of that infinite strength, to keep them patient and long-suffering and gentle and wise in the training of immortal souls."

"How rich this earth seems when we regard it — crowded with the loves of home! Yet I am now getting ready to go home — to leave this world of homes and go home. When I reach that home, shall I even then seek yet to go home? Even then, I believe, I shall seek a yet warmer, deeper, truer home in the deeper knowledge of God — in the truer love of my fellow men. Eternity will be — my heart and my faith tell me — a traveling homeward, but in jubilation and confidence and the vision of the beloved."

"Then I said in my heart, "Come home with me, beloved — there is but one home for us all. When we find — in proportion as each of us finds that home, shall we be gardens of delight to each other — little chambers of rest — galleries of pictures — wells of water.""

"And when you return home – to your house – think upon others Such as those who live in tents."

"A man is not really a true man until he owns his own home, and they that own their homes are made more honorable and honest and pure, true and economical and careful, by owning the home."