Frédéric Bastiat Short Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Frédéric Bastiat
All men's impulses, when motivated by legitimate self-interest, fall into a harmonious social pattern.

Frédéric Bastiat
The State is the great fiction through which everyone endeavours to live at the expense of everyone else.

Frédéric Bastiat
We hold from God the gift which includes all others. This gift is life - physical, intellectual, and moral life.

Frédéric Bastiat
The law has been perverted through the influence of two very different causes-naked greed and misconceived philanthropy.

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

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

Frédéric Bastiat
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?

Frédéric Bastiat
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.

Frédéric 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.

Frédéric Bastiat
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?

Frédéric Bastiat
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.

Frédéric 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 all is the monopoly of education.

Frédéric Bastiat
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

Frédéric Bastiat
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 would try to force them to be self-sacrificing.

Frédéric Bastiat