Here I encounter the most popular fallacy of our times. It is not considered sufficient that the law should guarantee to every citizen the free and i…

- Frederic Bastiat

Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we …

- Frederic Bastiat

If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers ar…

- Frederic Bastiat

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 law.

- Frederic Bastiat

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

- Frederic Bastiat

The most urgent necessity is, not that the State should teach, but that it should allow education. All monopolies are detestable, but the worst of al…

- Frederic Bastiat

The real cost of the State is the prosperity we do not see, the jobs that don’t exist, the technologies to which we do not have access, the businesse…

- Frederic Bastiat

Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at th…

- Frederic Bastiat

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 before…

- Frederic Bastiat