Frederic Bastiat Quotes

86 quotes in 1322 categories

• Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.
• Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed…
• Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
• The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.
• Each of us has a natural right, from God, to defend his person, his liberty, and his property.
• They will come to learn in the end, at their own expense, that it is better to endure competition for rich customers than to be…
• Often the masses are plundered and do not know it.
• In short, is not liberty the freedom of every person to make full use of his faculties, so long as he does not harm other…
• When goods do not cross borders, soldiers will.
• Finally, is not liberty the restricting of the law only to its rational sphere of organizing the right of the individual to lawful self-defense; of…
• What, then is law [government]? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.
• Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at the service…
• It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of…
• When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the…
• No legal plunder: This is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony, and logic. Until the day of my death, I shall proclaim this…
• By virtue of exchange, one man's prosperity is beneficial to all others.
• We cannot doubt that self-interest is the mainspring of human nature. It must be clearly understood that this word is used here to designate a…
• This question of legal plunder must be settled once and for all, and there are only three ways to settle it: (1) The few plunder…
• The sort of dependence that results from exchange, i.e., from commercial transactions, is a reciprocal dependence. We cannot be dependent upon a foreigner without his…
• ...the statement, "The purpose of the law is to cause justice to reign," is not a rigorously accurate statement. It ought to be stated that…

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