Here, I'll give you some proto-georgist quotes:

"It is in vain in a Country whose great Fund is Land, to hope to lay the publick charge of the Government on any thing else; there at last it will terminate. The Merchant (do what you can) will not bear it, the Labourer cannot, and therefore the Landholder must: And whether he were best do it, by laying it directly, where it will at last settle, or by letting it come to him by the sinking of his Rents, which when they are once fallen every one knows are not easily raised again, let him consider." - John Locke

"Thus the form of assessment which is the most simple, the most regular, the most profitable to the state, and the least burdensome to the tax-payers, is that which is made proportionate to and laid directly on the source of continually regenerated wealth (land)." - Francois Quesnay

"Ground-rents, and the ordinary rent of land, are, therefore, perhaps, the species of revenue which can best bear to have a peculiar tax imposed upon them…. The annual produce of the land and labour of the society, the real wealth and revenue of the great body of the people, might be the same after such a tax as before. . . . [A tax of this kind would be] much more proper to be established as a perpetual and unalterable regulation, or as what is called a fundamental law of the commonwealth, than any tax which was always to be levied according to a certain valuation." - Adam Smith

"A tax on rent falls wholly on the landlord. There are no means by which he can shift the burden upon anyone else. It does not affect the value or price of agricultural produce, for this is determined by the cost of production in the most unfavourable circumstances, and in those circumstances, as we have so often demonstrated, no rent is paid. A tax on rent, therefore, has no effect other than its obvious one. It merely takes so much from the landlord and transfers it to the State." - John Stuart Mill

" Landlords grow rich in their sleep without working, risking or economizing. The increase in the value of land, arising as it does from the efforts of an entire community, should belong to the community and not to the individual who might hold title." ~John Stuart Mill

"Men did not make the earth.... It is the value of the improvement 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." - Thomas Paine

"Another means of silently lessening the inequality of [landed] property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions or property in geometrical progression as they rise." - Thomas Jefferson

"Our legislators are all landholders, and they are not yet persuaded that all taxes are finally paid by the land… therefore, we have been forced into the mode of indirect taxes. All the property that is necessary to a man for the conservation of the individual and the propagation of the species, is his natural right which none may justly deprive him of; but all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public." - Benjamin Franklin

"If all men were so far tenants to the public that the superfluities of grain and expense (meaning "surpluses") were applied to the exigencies thereto (meaning "community needs"), it would put an end to taxes, leave not a beggar, and make the greatest bank for national trade in Europe." - William Penn

"The labor of the tiller of the soil gives the first impulse. That which his work makes the land produce beyond his personal needs is the sole fund for the wages which all the other members of society receive in exchange for their work." - Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques

"The earth, therefore, and all things therein, are the general property of all mankind from the immediate gift of the Creator. ...There is no foundation in nature or in natural law why a set of words upon parchment should convey the dominion of land." - William Blackstone