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The mind never fully accepts any convictions that it does not owe to its own efforts.

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
Accepting
Effort
Doe
Mind
Accepts
Never
Convictions
Efforts
Conviction
Fully

More quotes by Frederic Bastiat

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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
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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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There is not a tool, an implement, or a machine that has not resulted in a decrease in the contribution of human labor. Labor is not made permanently idle [though] when replaced in one special category... it turns its attack against other obstacles on the main road to progress.
Frederic Bastiat
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The plans differ the planners are all alike.
Frederic Bastiat
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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
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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
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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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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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If goods don't cross borders, armies will.
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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When goods do not cross borders, soldiers will.
Frederic Bastiat
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And this is what has taken place. The delusion of the day is to enrich all classes at the expense of each other it is to generalize plunder under pretense of organizing it.
Frederic Bastiat
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Either fraternity is spontaneous, or it does not exist. To decree it is to annihilate it. The law can indeed force men to remain just in vain would it try to force them to be self-sacrificing.
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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It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.
Frederic Bastiat
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Nothing is more senseless than to base so many expectations on the state, that is, to assume the existence of collective wisdom and foresight after taking for granted the existence of individual imbecility and improvidence.
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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Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.
Frederic Bastiat
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Property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property.
Frederic Bastiat
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Liberty is an acknowledgement of faith in God and his works.
Frederic Bastiat