Quotes by Frederic Bastiat

About Frederic Bastiat:

Claude Frédéric Bastiat was a French classical liberal theorist, political economist, and member of the French assembly. He was notable for developing the important economic concept of opportunity cost, and for introducing the Parable of the Broken Window or the "Glazier's fallacy". His ideas have provided a basis for Libertarianism and the Austrian School.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

They will come to learn in the end, at their own expense, that it is better to endure competition for rich customers than to be invested with monopoly over impoverished customers.

Frederic Bastiat

When goods do not cross borders, soldiers will.

Frederic Bastiat

Often the masses are plundered and do not know it.

Frederic Bastiat

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

Experience teaches effectually, but brutally. It makes us acquainted with all the effects of an action, by causing us to feel them; and we cannot fail to finish by knowing that fire burns, if we have burned ourselves. For this rough teacher, I should...

Frederic Bastiat

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.

Frederic Bastiat

The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawfu...

Frederic Bastiat

You compare the nation to a parched piece of land and the tax to a life-giving rain. So be it. But you should also ask yourself where this rain comes from, and whether it is not precisely the tax that draws the moisture from the soil and dries it up....

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

...for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.

Frederic Bastiat

The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable.

Frederic Bastiat

Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does it not logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the organized combination of the individual ...

Frederic Bastiat

The social organs are constituted so as to enable them to develop harmoniously in the grand air of liberty. Away, then, with quacks and organizers! Away with their rings, and their chains, and their hooks, and their pincers! Away with their artificia...

Frederic Bastiat

The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.

Frederic Bastiat

Lorsque la Spoliation est devenue le moyen d’existence d’une agglomération d’hommes unis entre eux par le lien social, ils se font bientôt une loi qui la sanctionne, une morale qui la glorifie.

Frederic Bastiat

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

Frederic Bastiat

Author Bio

  • NameFrederic Bastiat
  • DescriptionFrench classical liberal theorist, political economist, and member of the French assembly
  • AliasesClaude Frédéric Bastiat
  • BornJune 30, 1801
  • DiedDecember 24, 1850
  • CountryFrance
  • ProfessionPhilosopher; Economist; Author; Politician