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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
Causes
Happens
Skillfully
Thing
Defended
Good
Attacked
Cause
Liberty
Worst
Happen
More quotes by Frederic Bastiat
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.
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The creation of new capital always... releases... labor. Its actual effect [though] is not to make jobs scarce, but to free men's labor for other jobs.
Frederic Bastiat
No legal plunder: This is the principle of justice.
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It is easier to show the disorder that must accompany reform than the order that should follow it.
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What, then is law [government]? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.
Frederic Bastiat
The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder.
Frederic Bastiat
The mind never fully accepts any convictions that it does not owe to its own efforts.
Frederic Bastiat
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
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
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.
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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
Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim - when he defends himself - as a criminal.
Frederic Bastiat
If you wish to prosper, let your customer prosper. When people have learned this lesson, everyone will seek his individual welfare in the general welfare. Then jealousies between man and man, city and city, province and province, nation and nation, will no longer trouble the world.
Frederic Bastiat
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
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
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
We hold from God the gift which includes all others. This gift is life - physical, intellectual, and moral life.
Frederic Bastiat
Man acquires wealth in proportion as he puts his labor to better account.
Frederic Bastiat
Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough.
Frederic Bastiat
The profit of the one is the profit of the other.
Frederic Bastiat