George Bernard Shaw, from a letter read at a dinner commemorating the 25th anniversary of the publication of Progress and Poverty, and quoted in the New York Times (January 25, 1905):

"When I was thus swept into the great Socialist revival of 1883 I found that five-sixths of those who were swept in with me had been converted by Henry George. This fact would have been far more widely acknowledged had it not been that it was not possible for us to stop where Henry George stopped.

"What George did not teach you you are being taught now by your great trusts and combines, as to which I need only say that if you would take them over as National property as cheerfully as you took the copyrights of all my early books you would find them excellent institutions, quite in the path of progressive evolution, and by no means to be discouraged or left unregulated as if they were nobody's business but their own.

"It is a great pity that you all take America for granted because you were born in it. I, who have never crossed the Atlantic, and have taken nothing American for granted, find I know ten times as much about your country as you do yourselves: and my ambition is to repay my debt to Henry George by coming over some day and trying to do for your young men what Henry George did nearly a quarter of a century ago for me."