Frédéric Bastiat Quotes

There are two principles between which there can be no compromise—liberty and coercion.

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

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

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they cre...

The profit of the one is the profit of the other.

Which countries contain the most peaceful, the most moral, and the happiest people? Those people are...

The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.

Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does i...

Experience teaches effectually, but brutally. It makes us acquainted with all the effects of an acti...

The social organs are constituted so as to enable them to develop harmoniously in the grand air of l...

The law is guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish.

The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable.

The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, ...

...for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.

Trade protection accumulates upon a single point the good which it effects, while the evil inflicted...

When misguided public opinion honors what is despicable and despises what is honorable, punishes vir...

Have you ever witnessed the anger of the good shopkeeper, James Goodfellow, when his careless son ha...

I can never look at these apparent contradictions between the great laws of nature without a feeling...

We need not be surprised at this. On a wrong road, inconsistency is inevitable; if it were not so, m...

But things have been so admirably arranged by the Divine inventor of social order that in this, as i...

I cannot possibly understand how fraternity can be legally enforced without liberty being legally de...

In fact, if law were restricted to protecting all persons, all liberties, and all properties; if law...

. . . for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.

Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number o...

In the first place, it would efface from everybody’sconscience the distinction between justice and i...

We disapprove of state education. Than the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We o...

Life, faculties, production-in other words, individuality, liberty, property-this is man. And in spi...

One of the strangest phenomena of our time, and one that will probably be a matter of astonishment t...

I do not think that illegal plunder, such as theft or swindling — which the penal code defines, anti...

There is in all of us a strong disposition to regard what is lawful as legitimate, so much so that m...

The most urgent necessity is, not that the State should teach, but that it should allow education. A...