Quote

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

Frederic Bastiat

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Frederic Bastiat

Image
...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
Image
And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works
Frederic Bastiat
Image
Property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property.
Frederic Bastiat
Image
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
Image
The solution of the social problem is in liberty.
Frederic Bastiat
Image
What, then is law [government]? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.
Frederic Bastiat
Image
It is not true that the legislator has absolute power over our persons and property. The existence of persons and property preceded the existence of the legislator, and his function is only to guarantee their safety.
Frederic Bastiat
Image
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
Image
The mind never fully accepts any convictions that it does not owe to its own efforts.
Frederic Bastiat
Image
Liberty is an acknowledgement of faith in God and his works.
Frederic Bastiat
Image
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
Image
We cannot doubt that self-interest is the mainspring of human nature. It must be clearly understood that this word is used here to designate a universal, incontestable fact, resulting from the nature of man, and not an adverse judgment, as would be the word selfishness.
Frederic Bastiat
Image
When plunder becomes a way of life, men create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
Frederic Bastiat
Image
The law commit legal plunder by violating liberty and property.
Frederic Bastiat
Image
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
Image
We hold from God the gift which includes all others. This gift is life - physical, intellectual, and moral life.
Frederic Bastiat
Image
Finally, is not liberty the restricting of the law only to its rational sphere of organizing the right of the individual to lawful self-defense of punishing injustice?
Frederic Bastiat
Image
The real cost of the State is the prosperity we do not see, the jobs that don’t exist, the technologies to which we do not have access, the businesses that do not come into existence, and the bright future that is stolen from us. The State has looted us just as surely as a robber who enters our home at night and steals all that we love.
Frederic Bastiat
Image
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
Image
The state tends to expand in proportion to its means of existence and to live beyond its means, and these are, in the last analysis, nothing but the substance of the people. Woe to the people that cannot limit the sphere of action of the state! Freedom, private enterprise, wealth, happiness, independence, personal dignity, all vanish.
Frederic Bastiat