Frederic Bastiat Quotes

When plunder becomes a way of life, men create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

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

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

If philanthropy is not voluntary, it destroys liberty and justice. The law can give nothing that has not first been taken from its owner.

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.

The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended.

There are people who think that plunder loses all its immorality as soon as it becomes legal. Personally, I cannot imagine a more alarming situation.

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?

Is not liberty the destruction of all despotism - including, of course, legal despotism?

Trade barriers constitute isolation; isolation gives rise to hatred, hatred to war, and war to invasion.

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

If you wish to prosper, let your customer prosper.

If goods don't cross borders, armies will.

Often the masses are plundered and do not know it.

Competition is merely the absence of oppression.

Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough.

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 plunder.

And this is what has taken place. The delusion of the day is to enrich all classes at the expense of each other; it is to generalize plunder under pretense of organizing it.

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

The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder.

It's always tempting to do good at someone else's expense

The solution of the social problem is in liberty.

The law can be an instrument of equalization only as it takes from some persons and gives to other persons. When the law does this, it is an instrument of plunder.

The mind never fully accepts any convictions that it does not owe to its own efforts.

The law commit legal plunder by violating liberty and property.

Taking Five and Returning Four is not Giving

The plans differ; the planners are all alike.

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?

Justice is achieved only when injustice is absent.

People are beginning to realize that the apparatus of government is costly. But what they do not know is that the burden falls inevitably on them.

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

Treat all economic questions from the viewpoint of the consumer, for the interests of the consumer are the interests of the human race.

The balance of trade is an article of faith.

When goods do not cross borders, soldiers will.

Law cannot organize labor and industry without organizing injustice.

By virtue of exchange, one man's prosperity is beneficial to all others.

Repetition may not entertain, but it teaches.

Since the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to allow them liberty, how comes it to pass that the tendencies of organizers are always good?

When, then, does plunder stop? It stops when it becomes more painful and more dangerous than labor.

Slavery, protection, and monopoly find defenders, not only in those who profit by them, but in those who suffer by them.

Property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is 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 invested with monopoly over impoverished customers.

Liberty is an acknowledgement of faith in God and his works.

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

The mission of law is not to oppress persons and plunder them of their property, even thought the law may be acting in a philanthropic spirit. Its mission is to protect property.

What, then is law [government]? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.

No legal plunder: This is the principle of justice.

Either fraternity is spontaneous, or it does not exist. To decree it is to annihilate it. The law can indeed force men to remain just; in vain would it try to force them to be self-sacrificing.

If everyone enjoyed the unrestricted use of his faculties and the free disposition of the fruits of his labor, social progress would be ceaseless, uninterrupted, and unfailing.

Countries which enjoy the highest level of peace, happiness and prosperity are the ones where the law least interfered with private affairs.