Explore Quotes by Frederic Bastiat

The people who, during the election, were so wise, so moral, so perfect, now have no tendencies whatever; or if they have any, they are tendencies that lead downward to degradation. . . . If people are as incapable, as immoral, and as ignorant as the politicians indicate, then why is the right of these same people to vote defended with such passionate insistence?

The mission of the law is not to oppress persons and plunder them of their property, even though the law may be acting in a philanthropic spirit. Its purpose is to protect persons and property.... If you exceed this proper limit -- if you attempt to make the law religious, fraternal, equalizing, philanthropic, industrial, or artistic -- you will then be lost in uncharted territory, in vagueness and uncertainty, in a forced utopia or, even worse, in a multitude of utopias, each striving to seize the law and impose it on you.

Property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property.

Justice is achieved only when injustice is absent.

Law cannot organize labor and industry without organizing injustice.

Men naturally rebel against the injustice of which they are victims. Thus, when plunder is organized by law for the profit of those who make the law, all the plundered classes try somehow to enter, by peaceful or revolutionary means, into the making of laws. According to their degree of enlightenment, these plundered classes may propose one of two entirely different purposes when they attempt to attain political power: Either they may wish to stop lawful plunder, or they may wish to share in it.

Property, the right to enjoy the fruits of one's labor, the right to work, to develop, to exercise one's faculties, according to one's own understanding, without the state intervening otherwise than by its protective action; this is what is meant by liberty

When under the pretext of fraternity, the legal code imposes mutual sacrifices on the citizens, human nature is not thereby abrogated. Everyone will then direct his efforts toward contributing little to, and taking much from, the common fund of sacrifices. Now, is it the most unfortunate who gains from this struggle? Certainly not, but rather the most influential and calculating.

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 punishing injustice?

When goods do not cross borders, soldiers will.

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 persons while doing so?

Often the masses are plundered and do not know it.

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 invested with monopoly over impoverished customers.

Each of us has a natural right, from God, to defend his person, his liberty, and his property.

The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

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 beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.

Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.

Legal plunder has two roots: One, as we have just seen, is in human selfishness; the other is in false philanthropy.

No society can exist if respect for the law does not to some extent prevail; but the surest way to have the laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality are in contradiction, the citizen finds himself in the cruel dilemma of either losing his moral sense or of losing respect for the law, two evils of which one is as great as the other, and between which it is difficult to choose.

Let us first of all frugality in government-peace and freedom we will have as a bonus.