Competition is merely the absence of oppression.
~ Frédéric Bastiat

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The profit of the one is the profit of the other.
~ Frédéric Bastiat

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By virtue of exchange, one man’s prosperity is beneficial to all others.
~ Frédéric Bastiat

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

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It is a rather singular argument to maintain that, because an abuse which has been permitted a temporary existence, cannot be corrected without wounding the interests of those who have profited by it, it ought, therefore, to claim perpetual duration.
~ Frédéric Bastiat

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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

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Either fraternity is spontaneous, or it does not exist. To decree it is to annihilate it.
~ Frédéric Bastiat

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In the department of economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects.
~ Frédéric Bastiat

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At whatever point on the scientific horizon I begin my researches, I invariably reach this one conclusion: The solution to the problems of human relationships is to be found in liberty.
~ Frédéric Bastiat

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If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?
~ Frédéric Bastiat

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