Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
~ Frédéric Bastiat

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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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