Bastiat Quotes
Collection of top 63 famous quotes about Bastiat
Bastiat Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Bastiat quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
the decisive proof that the people are dupes is when the priest is rich and powerful.
— Frederic Bastiat
Money serves only to facilitate the transmission of these useful things from one to another,
— Frederic Bastiat
The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder.
— Frederic Bastiat
The problem is, not to find whether the picture is mournful, but whether it is true. And for that we have the testimony of history.
— Frederic Bastiat
The law has been perverted by the influence of two entirely different causes: stupid greed and false philanthropy. Let us speak of the first.
— Frederic Bastiat
Money only appears for the sake of facilitating the arrangements between the parties.
— Frederic Bastiat
Indeed, a more astounding fact, in the heart of society, cannot be conceived than this: That law should have become an instrument of injustice.
— Frederic Bastiat
If philanthropy is not voluntary, it destroys liberty and justice. The law can give nothing that has not first been taken from its owner.
— Frederic Bastiat
It often happens, that the sweeter the first fruit of a habit is, the more bitter are the consequences.
— Frederic Bastiat
the common force cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, the liberty, or the property of individuals or of classes. For
— Frederic Bastiat
Countries which enjoy the highest level of peace, happiness and prosperity are the ones where the law least interfered with private affairs.
— Frederic Bastiat
Society is the total of the forced or voluntary services that men perform for each other; that is to say, of public services and private services.
— Frederic Bastiat
We hold from God the gift which, as far as we are concerned, contains all others, Life - physical, intellectual, and moral life.
— Frederic Bastiat
Each of us has a natural right, from God, to defend his person, his liberty, and his property.
— Frederic Bastiat
But yet he may live and enjoy, by seizing and appropriating the productions of the faculties of his fellow men. This is the origin of plunder. Now,
— Frederic Bastiat
Man acquires wealth in proportion as he puts his labor to better account.
— Frederic Bastiat
Is not liberty the destruction of all despotism - including, of course, legal despotism?
— Frederic Bastiat
In the first place, the word universal conceals a gross sophism.
— Frederic Bastiat
The law has been perverted through the influence of two very different causes-naked greed and misconceived philanthropy.
— Frederic Bastiat
The price of labor, like the price of everything else, is governed by the relation of supply to demand.
— Frederic Bastiat
Often the masses are plundered and do not know it.
— Frederic Bastiat
The law is guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish.
— Frederic Bastiat
The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is, not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended.
— Frederic Bastiat
Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
— Frederic Bastiat
For what are our faculties, but the extension of our personality? and what is property, but an extension of our faculties?
— Frederic Bastiat
It's always tempting to do good at someone else's expense
— Frederic Bastiat
Man does not live upon nominal values, but upon real products, and the more products there are, whatever be their price, the richer he is.
— Frederic Bastiat
When an abuse has once taken root everything is arranged on the assumption of its continuance.
— Frederic 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?
— Frederic Bastiat
Repetition may not entertain, but it teaches.
— Frederic Bastiat
Slavery, protection, and monopoly find defenders, not only in those who profit by them, but in those who suffer by them.
— Frederic Bastiat
Taking Five and Returning Four is not Giving
— Frederic Bastiat
Despoilers obey the Malthusian law; they multiply with the means of existence, and the means of existence of knaves is the credulity of their dupes.
— Frederic Bastiat
The plans differ; the planners are all alike ...
— Frederic Bastiat
The balance of trade is an article of faith.
— Frederic Bastiat
Monopoly, like every other system of injustice, carries in itself its own punishment.
— Frederic Bastiat
Treat all economic questions from the viewpoint of the consumer, for the interests of the consumer are the interests of the human race.
— Frederic Bastiat
There are two principles between which there can be no compromise - liberty and coercion.
— Frederic Bastiat
The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.
— Frederic Bastiat
The profit of the one is the profit of the other.
— Frederic Bastiat
The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable.
— Frederic Bastiat
Competition is merely the absence of oppression.
— Frederic Bastiat
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.
— Frederic Bastiat
No one borrows money for the sake of the money itself; money is only the medium by which to obtain possession of products.
— Frederic Bastiat
By virtue of exchange, one man's prosperity is beneficial to all others.
— Frederic Bastiat
I cannot possibly understand how fraternity can be legally enforced without liberty being legally destroyed ...
— Frederic Bastiat
Property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property.
— Frederic Bastiat
Legal plunder has two roots: One of them, as I have said before, is in human greed; the other is in false philanthropy.
— Frederic Bastiat
Liberty is an acknowledgement of faith in God and his works.
— Frederic Bastiat
It is easier to show the disorder that must accompany reform than the order that should follow it.
— Frederic 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.
— Frederic Bastiat
Law and Charity Are Not the Same
— 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
Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone.
— Frederic Bastiat
When goods do not cross borders, soldiers will.
— Frederic Bastiat
The purpose of the socialists is to suppress liberty of association precisely in order to force people to associate together in true liberty.)
— Frederic Bastiat
Trade barriers constitute isolation; isolation gives rise to hatred, hatred to war, and war to invasion.
— Frederic Bastiat
Legal plunder has two roots: One, as we have just seen, is in human selfishness; the other is in false philanthropy.
— Frederic Bastiat
Existence, faculties, assimilation - in other words, personality, liberty, property - this is man.
— Frederic Bastiat
Legislators have almost always been ignorant of the object of society, which is to unite families by a common interest.
— Frederic Bastiat
