It is not because men have made laws, that personality, liberty, and property exist. On the contrary, it is because personality, liberty, and propert… - Frédéric Bastiat

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It is not because men have made laws, that personality, liberty, and property exist. On the contrary, it is because personality, liberty, and property exist beforehand, that men make laws.

English
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About Frédéric Bastiat

Frédéric Bastiat (30 June 1801 – 24 December 1850) was an early free-market economist and classical liberal French author.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Claude Frédéric Bastiat Frederic Bastiat
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Additional quotes by Frédéric 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 artificial methods! Away with their social laboratories, their governmental whims, their centralization, their tariffs, their universities, their State religions, their inflationary or monopolizing banks, their limitations, their restrictions, their moralizations, and their equalization by taxation! And now, after having vainly inflicted upon the social body so many systems, let them end where they ought to have begun — reject all systems, and try of liberty — liberty, which is an act of faith in God and in His work

As soon as the injured classes have recovered their political rights, their first thought is not to abolish plunder (this would suppose them to possess enlightenment, which they cannot have), but to organize against the other classes, and to their own detriment, a system of reprisals — as if it was necessary, before the reign of justice arrives, that all should undergo a cruel retribution — some for their iniquity and some for their ignorance.

In fact, it is impossible for me to separate the word fraternity from the word voluntary. I cannot possibly understand how fraternity can be legally enforced without liberty being legally destroyed, and thus justice being legally trampled underfoot.

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