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The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended.

Frederic Bastiat

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Frederic Bastiat
Age: 49 †
Born: 1801
Born: June 30
Died: 1850
Died: December 24
Economist
Essayist
Magistrate
Philosopher
Politician
Baiona
Claude Frédéric Bastiat
Good
Attacked
Cause
Liberty
Worst
Happen
Causes
Happens
Skillfully
Thing
Defended

More quotes by Frederic Bastiat

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No legal plunder: This is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony, and logic. Until the day of my death, I shall proclaim this principle with all the force of my lungs (which alas! is all too inadequate).
Frederic Bastiat
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No legal plunder: This is the principle of justice.
Frederic Bastiat
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People are beginning to realize that the apparatus of government is costly. But what they do not know is that the burden falls inevitably on them.
Frederic Bastiat
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Slavery, protection, and monopoly find defenders, not only in those who profit by them, but in those who suffer by them.
Frederic Bastiat
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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
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The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder.
Frederic Bastiat
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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.
Frederic Bastiat
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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 becomes perceptible only to close investigation.
Frederic Bastiat
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Property, the right to enjoy the fruits of one's labor, the right to work, to develop, to exercise one's faculties, according to one's own understanding, without the state intervening otherwise than by its protective action this is what is meant by liberty
Frederic Bastiat
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The profit of the one is the profit of the other.
Frederic Bastiat
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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
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We hold from God the gift which includes all others. This gift is life - physical, intellectual, and moral life.
Frederic Bastiat
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Legal plunder has two roots: One, as we have just seen, is in human selfishness the other is in false philanthropy.
Frederic Bastiat
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The impulses of my heart are the voice of Nature, which is never mistaken. The institutions that stand in my way are man-made and are only arbitrary conventions to which I have never given my consent. In trampling these institutions underfoot, I shall have the double pleasure of satisfying my inclinations and of believing myself a hero
Frederic Bastiat
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The law can be an instrument of equalization only as it takes from some persons and gives to other persons. When the law does this, it is an instrument of plunder.
Frederic Bastiat
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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
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When misguided public opinion honors what is despicable and despises what is honorable, punishes virtue and rewards vice, encourages what is harmful and discourages what is useful, applauds falsehood and smothers truth under indifference or insult, a nation turns its back on progress and can be restored only by the terrible lessons of catastrophe.
Frederic Bastiat
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The mission of law is not to oppress persons and plunder them of their property, even thought the law may be acting in a philanthropic spirit. Its mission is to protect property.
Frederic 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?
Frederic Bastiat
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...the statement, The purpose of the law is to cause justice to reign, is not a rigorously accurate statement. It ought to be stated that the purpose of the law is to prevent injustice from reigning. In fact, it is injustice, instead of justice, that has an existence of its own. Justice is achieved only when injustice is absent.
Frederic Bastiat