Quotes by Frederic Bastiat

“I cannot possibly understand how fraternity can be legally enforced without liberty being legally destroyed...”

“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.”

“. . . 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 of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive ...”

“I do not think that illegal plunder, such as theft or swindling — which the penal code defines, anticipates, and punishes — can be called socialism. It is not this kind of plunder that systematical...”

“One of the strangest phenomena of our time, and one that will probably be a matter of astonishment to our decedents, is that doctrine which is founded upon this triple hypothesis: the radical passi...”

“But things have been so admirably arranged by the Divine inventor of social order that in this, as in everything else, political economy and morality, far from clashing, agree; and the wisdom of Ar...”

“Have you ever witnessed the anger of the good shopkeeper, James Goodfellow, when his careless son has happened to break a pane of glass? If you have been present at such a scene, you will most assu...”

“We disapprove of state education. Than the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Than the socialists say that we don't want an religion at all. We obje...”

“Trade protection accumulates upon a single point the good which it effects, while the evil inflicted is infused throughout the mass. The one strikes the eye at a first glance, while the other becom...”

“In the first place, it would efface from everybody’sconscience the distinction between justice and injustice.No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a cer-tain degree, but the safest ...”