I have a theory that we judge best of the reality of friendships in absence; and if this be true, I cannot have been mistaken as to the warmth of my … - J. Howard Moore

No man has a right to a million dollars. If so where did he get the right? Not from Nature nor reason, but from man-made legislatures—from the same immaculate source from which he got the right a little while ago to cut the blood out of the backs of poor helpless Africans with hippopotamus whips. No man has a right to monopolise the world to the extent of a million dollars. It is more than one man's share—much more. We are brothers. The world belongs to all of us, not to any one class. A million dollars in one hand means over-appropriation—plunder, too often scaped with fiendish unconcern from the bleeding palms of the poor. Every millionaire or multi-millionaire that wallows in golden mud-puddles compels hundreds of other men to go through life deprived of their birthright. I would be ashamed to be rich, and I would be ashamed to know that I had my share of the world and the shares of hundreds or thousands of my fellow-men besides. If there is one thing that ought to be plain, even to simpletons, it is the fact that the privilege of being born carries with it the right to an inalienable equity in the world in which we at birth find ourselves. It is not true, however prevalently it may be practised, that men acquire the right to own and hold and use the earth, and to exclude others from its use, by being born with the power or opportunity to get possession of it.

Man treats those co-operating with him in the labor of life as mere means to his own selfish purposes. He feeds and shelters them for the same reason that the capitalist feeds and shelters the poor human beings who serve him—simply to make them last as long as possible. There is no equity in the matter—no brotherhood—no thought of the Golden Rule. They are to him simply lemons—things to be squeezed, nothing more. And when he has extracted from them every benefit he is able to extract, he casts them out, as the money-hog does his worn-out workmen, to rot.

[M]an also was once a wild animal. And it is impossible to understand the things men do—many of them are so horrible and idiotic—unless we take into account the fact that this agricultural and town-building being whom we see when we look in a mirror was once a literal beast of the field, clothed in natural hair, without mercy, modesty, matrimony, or religion, living on roots, fruits, honey, and birds' eggs, and contending doubtfully with other animals about him for life.