Landlord Tenant Quotes & Sayings

The relation of landlord and tenant is not an ideal one, but any relations in a social order will endure if there is infused into them some of that spirit of human sympathy which qualifies life for immortality. — George William Russell

One of the worst incidents of that era caused no complaints at all: this was a sort of good-natured firepower demonstration, which occured one Sunday morning about three-thirty. For reasons that were never made clear, I blew out my back windows with five blasts of a 12 gauge shotgun, followed moments later by six rounds from a .44 Magnum. It was a prolonged outburst of heavy firing, drunken laughter, and crashing glass. Yet the neighbors reacted with total silence. For a while I assumed that some freakish wind pocket had absorbed all the noise and carried it out to sea, but after my eviction I learned otherwise. Every one of the shots had been duly recorded on the gossip log. Another tenant in the building told me the landlord was convinced, by all the tales he'd heard, that the interior of my apartment was reduced to rubble by orgies, brawls, fires, and wanton shooting. He had even heard stories about motorcycles being driven in and out the front door. — Hunter S. Thompson

It is long settled in California that a landlord who resorts to self-help [such as removing a tenant's personal belongings and changing the locks, even though the tenant is still in legal possession of the property] instead of invoking the unlawful detainer procedure commits a forcible entry and detainer, and is liable for actual and, sometimes, punitive damages (see Jordan v Talbot (1961) 55 C2d 597), regardless of any lease provision giving the landlord the right to reenter on default (55 C2d at 604) or any lien the landlord may wish to exercise (55 C2d at 609). — Myron Moskovitz

Making the landlord and the tenant the same person has certain advantages, as that the tenant pays no rent, while the landlord does a little work. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Some rent control ordinances permit a landlord to evict a tenant in order to rehabilitate a unit. [....] Such evictions are usually conditioned on the landlord's obtaining all necessary permits before the eviction. Some ordinances require that the tenant be given (1) the right to occupy any vacant unit that the same landlord owns within the city, (2) the right to reoccupy the vacated unit on the completion of the rehabilitation work, or (3) a payment to defray the costs of relocation. [....]
A landlord who refuses to allow the tenant to reoccupy the vacated unit is subject to liability under the governing ordinance. — Myron Moskovitz

Too often, the landlord-tenant relationship is unbalanced with all the power on the side of unscrupulous landlords. — Nydia Velazquez

The colonies, it seems, were societies of contending classes - a fact obscured by the emphasis, in traditional histories, on the external struggle against England, the unity of colonists in the Revolution. The country therefore was not "born free" but born slave and free, servant and master, tenant and landlord, poor and rich. — Howard Zinn

Lawyers, before any other group, must continue to point out how the system is really working-how it actually affects real people. They must constantly demonstrate to courts and legislatures alike the tragic results of legal nonintervention. They must highlight how legal doctrines no longer bear any relation to reality, whether in landlord and tenant law, holder in due course law, or any other law. In sum, lawyers must bring real morality into the legal consciousness — William J. Brennan

In short, no association or alliance can be happy or stable without me. People can't long tolerate a ruler, nor can a master his servant, a maid her mistress, a teacher his pupil, a friend his friend nor a wife her husband, a landlord his tenant, a soldier his comrade nor a party-goer his companion, unless they sometimes have illusions about each other, make use of flattery, and have the sense to turn a blind eye and sweeten life for themselves with the honey of folly. — Desiderius Erasmus

Fear will always be a tenant in your mind, but do not make fear the landlord of your mind. — Wisdom Primus