The Book of Trespass Quotes

“There are boundaries in nature. There are rivers, forests, escarpments, ravines and mountain ranges; there are cellulose walls. But these boundaries are in fact areas of transaction, semi-permeable membranes. The notion that a perimeter should be impenetrable is a human contrivance alone.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“Walls look like order; but more often than not a wall stands at the precise fulcrum of an imbalance in society. Most walls are only necessary as a means of defending the resources of those that have them from those that lack them. In this way, though they present themselves as mechanisms of security, they are in fact tools of oppression.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“You must work for a living,’ proclaim the nobility (from the chaise longue).”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“Central to paternalism is the notion of the status quo: that its form of government is the only viable option. Through history, the concept of the feminine has been linked by the patriarchy to sedition, protest, any form of questioning this status quo.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“only a year after the outbreak of plague Edward III enacted the Ordinance of Labourers, which sought to cap wage increases and curb this new-found mobility. With its extra stipulation that any beggar who was deemed able to work should be refused charity, it is also the first time in English law that we see the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, a pathological obsession of the English that lasts to this day.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“Originally, the word "wilderness" was a compound of wild and deer; it was any place where wild animals roamed free. But wild-deer-ness was always more than just a place; it was a state of mind. Frances Zaunmiller, the mountain woman who spent forty-fire years living along Salmon River in the Idaho outback, defined wilderness as the psychological expanse where 'a man can walk without trespassing'.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“you don’t inherit the land from your ancestors, you borrow it from your children.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“Today, the national crisis that grips the land is not Brexit, but the spell that binds 92 per cent of the land and 97 per cent of the waterways in England from public use. If England really wants to take back control, it should take it from the anachronistic system of ownership that has left so many of its people dispossessed of their rights.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“Once again, the fence creates the crime.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“the roots of Ownership Anxiety, the obsessive evasion of scrutiny, is that it simply cannot be justified.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“Winston Churchill, who himself crossed and re-crossed the fence line of partisan politics, said much the same thing: ‘It is not the individual I attack; it is the system. It is not the man who is bad; it is the law which is bad. It is not the man who is blameworthy for doing what the law allows and what other men do; it is the state which would be blameworthy if it were not to endeavour to reform the law and correct the practice.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“We need space for the mind to rave, to wander and to dream. Access to land is access to experience and access to nature is access to our own wild, spiritual mind.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“As long as what happens on the land is governed by a select few there will never be a society that reflects the values of its constituents, there will never be an England that reflects the values of anything but a tiny minority of its citizens.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“Free festivals, organic gatherings of people on common land, have always been a threat to the status quo. But organised, sanctioned festivals, the bread and circuses of ancient Rome, were seen as a way of allowing people to vent their frustrations in a manner contained by local authorities.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“But mindfulness is just idleness without the social stigma, repackaged with a barcode and brand. Idleness, from the Germanic word Idla, meaning worthless, has historically been a term given to any use of time not dedicated to turning profit; it is a slur on a vernacular use of time. It is the bane of the authorities and used to this day to describe anyone who is not doing what they ought to be doing. And since the industrial revolution, with the work ethic firmly installed into our modern minds, the final victory of commercialism has been to sell idleness back to us. This is rentier capitalism of the mind – access to experience is enclosed, monopolised and rented out as a commodity.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“Nationalism presents the orthodoxy of class supremacy as a national doxa, and, just like Cannadine’s definition of class, it is nothing more than a ‘rhetorical construction’, whose walls are built with words alone.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“When the Conservatives privatised the contracts for housing asylum seekers in 2012, the companies sought housing where land was the cheapest – in deprived areas, places already suffering from neglect and the stranglehold of austerity. In 2016, in Middlesbrough, one in every 152 people was an asylum seeker; in Rochdale, one in every 204 and in Bolton, one in 271. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these towns all voted to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum. While the feeling of being swamped was blamed on an external threat, it was in fact caused by internal inequality, organised from deep within the system of England: the price of land.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“Originating from the Greek δοκεῖν, meaning to seem or to appear, a doxa is a belief so widely held in society that it becomes seemingly self-evident: it requires no explanation and receives no scrutiny.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“Nationalism is a dream of simplicity, an anaesthetic to the complexities of a fluid world.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“The collective narcissist sees every situation polarised by the innate excellence of their nation and the subsequent assumption that other nationalities want a piece of it.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“Englishmen took the wealth of foreign nations and claimed it as their own. But we are still a long way from recognising the deeper truth: that it was practised first on their own soil, when the landlords colonised the commons.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“The aristocrats of England made their money by monopolising the land and using their elite definition of property rights to line their own pockets.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“The British taxpayer finances this destruction to enable the pastime of a select few. Avery estimates that the 147 moors across England, which occupy over half a million acres, are used by just 5,000 individuals – under 0.01 per cent of the population. The law defends the rights of the few over the many, by right of property alone.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“Today, a third of Britain is still owned by the aristocracy. The twenty-four remaining non-royal dukes own almost four million acres between them.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“Decorative pomp and verbose flummery is all that disguises the bare basics of the aristocratic wealth system – land enclosed, resources monopolised and rights of use sold back to those that can afford them. Let the daylight in on the magic, and you have nothing but basic rentier capitalism.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“Today, fees at Eton are now almost £13,000 per term, and at Winchester £400 more. But with the phrase ‘bred into the marrow of their bones’ the aristocracy suddenly lurches from a quaint daydream to something altogether more chilling. This is eugenics, in top hat and tails.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“Geoffrey Hughes, Professor of the History of the English Language in Johannesburg, explains: ‘It is a likely speculation that the Norman French title “count” was abandoned in England in favour of the Germanic “earl” … precisely because of the uncomfortable phonetic proximity to cunt.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“Only recently have our rights to protest been secured in law. Article 10 of the European Convention for Human Rights (1953) ratifies our right for Freedom of Expression and Article 11 gives us a human right for Freedom of Assembly and Association. However, in England, the laws of private property trump our collective human rights, which means on private land neither of these rights apply.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“The mindwall has become so entrenched in our heads that it remains unchallenged and unquestioned.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

“The walls of England’s private estates, erected by our richest and most established families, the Arundels, the Buccleuchs, the Beauforts, Grosvenors, Lonsdales and Bedfords possess a grandeur and authority that has somehow overridden the violence and theft, the malevolence they enacted to build them.”
― Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us