Freedom and Harmony
The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is, not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended. –Sophisms, 107

There is power only in principles:  They alone are a beacon light for men’s minds, a rallying point for convictions gone astray. –Essays, 113

Society is composed of men, and every man is a free agent.  Since man is free, he can choose; since he can choose, he can err; since he can err, he can suffer.  I go further:  He must err and he must suffer; for his starting point is ignorance, and in his ignorance he sees before him an infinite number of unknown roads, all of which save one lead to error. –Harmonies, xxx

I do not call upon the state to compel everyone to accept my opinion, but, rather, not to force me to accept anybody else’s opinion.  There is a great difference between the one and the other; let us make no mistake about it. –Essays, 276

If political economy attains to the insight that men’s interests are harmonious, it does so because it does not stop, as socialism does, at the immediate consequences of phenomena, but goes on to their eventual and ultimate effects. –Essays, 138

Progress consists in making the forces of Nature serve more and more as a means for the satisfaction of our wants, so that in each successive age the same amount of utility is obtained at the cost of less effort, leaving at the disposal of society either increased leisure or a greater supply of labor for providing new satisfactions. . . . Each advance over Nature, after first rewarding the initiative of a few men, soon becomes, by the operation of the law of competition, the gratuitous and common heritage of all mankind. –Harmonies, 416

By virtue of exchange, one man’s prosperity is beneficial to all others. –Harmonies, 82

When you hear someone declaiming against the social order, against private ownership of the land, against rent, against machines, take him to the virgin forest or confront him with a fetid swamp.  Say to him:  I wish to rescue you from the atrocious struggles of anarchistic competition, from the conflicts of antagonistic interests, from the selfishness of wealth, from the tyranny of property, from the crushing rivalry of machines, from the stifling atmosphere of society.  Here is land like that encountered by the men who first cleared the forests and drained the swamps.  Take as much of it as you want by tens or hundreds of acres.  Cultivate it yourself.  All that you make it produce is yours.  There is only one condition:  you must have no recourse to society, which, you say, has victimized you. –Harmonies, 213

Capital has from the beginning of time worked to free men from the yoke of ignorance, want, and tyranny.  To frighten away capital is to rivet a triple chain around the arms of the human race. –Harmonies, 190

Property, the right to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor, the right to work, to develop, to exercise one’s own understanding, without the state intervening otherwise than by its protective action—this is what is meant by liberty. –Essays, 109

Thanks to the nonintervention of the state in private affairs, wants and satisfactions would develop in their natural order.  We should not see poor families seeking instruction in literature before they have bread.  We should not see the city being populated at the expense of the country, or the country at the expense of the city.  We should not see those great displacements of capital, of labor, and of population which are provoked by legislative measures, displacements that render the very sources of existence so uncertain and precarious, and thereby add so greatly to the responsibilities of the government. –Essays, 53

No society can exist if respect for the law does not to some extent prevail; but the surest way to have the laws respected is to make them respectable.  When law and morality are in contradiction, the citizen finds himself in the cruel dilemma of either losing his moral sense or of losing respect for the law, two evils of which one is as great as the other, and between which it is difficult to choose. –Essays, 56

It is not because men have passed laws that personality, liberty, and property exist.  On the contrary, it is because personality, liberty, and property already exist that men make laws. –Essays, 51

Law is the organization of the natural right to legitimate self-defense; it is the substitution of collective force for individual forces, to act in the sphere in which they have the right to act, to do what they have the right to do:  To guarantee security of person, liberty, and property rights, to cause justice to reign over all. –Essays, 52

Thus, as an individual cannot legitimately use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, for the same reason collective force cannot legitimately be applied to destroy the person, liberty, and property of individuals or classes. –Essays, 52

Try to imagine a system of labor imposed by force that is not a violation of liberty; a transfer of wealth imposed by force that is not a violation of property rights.  If you cannot do so, then you must agree that the law cannot organize labor and industry without organizing injustice. –Essays, 66

Government acts only by the intervention of force; hence, its action is legitimate only where the intervention of force is itself legitimate. –Harmonies, 456

A man who would consider himself a bandit if, pistol in hand, he prevented me from carrying out a transaction that was in conformity with my interests has no scruples in working and voting for a law that replaces his private force with the public force and subjects me, at my own expense, to the same unjust restriction. –Harmonies, 463

When it is a question of taxes, gentlemen, prove their usefulness by reasons with some foundation, but not with that lamentable assertion:  “Public spending keeps the working class alive.”   It makes the mistake of covering up a fact that is essential to know:  namely, that public spending is always a substitute for private spending, and that consequently it may well support one worker in place of another but adds nothing to the lot of the working class taken as a whole.  Your argument is fashionable, but it is quite absurd, for the reasoning is not correct. –Essays, 16

What must be the consequence of all this intervention? . . . Capital, under the impact of such a doctrine, will hide, flee, be destroyed.  And what will become, then, of the workers, those workers for whom you profess an affection so deep and sincere, but so unenlightened?  Will they be better fed when agricultural production is stopped?  Will they be better dressed when no one dares to build a factory?  Will they have more employment when capital will have disappeared? –Essays, 109

Where, at such a time, is the bold speculator who would dare set up a factory or engage in an enterprise? . . . What man in the whole country has the least knowledge of the position in which the law will forcibly place him and his line of work tomorrow?  And, under such conditions, who can or will undertake anything? –Essays, 107

The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else. –Essays, 144

It will not be long before the public finances reach a state of complete disorder.  How could it be otherwise when the state is responsible for furnishing everything to everybody?  The people will be crushed under the burden of taxes; loan after loan will be floated; after having drained the present, the state will devour the future. –Essays, 128

No greater change nor any greater evil could be introduced into society than this:  to convert the law into an instrument of plunder. –Essays, 55

Illegal plunder fills everyone with aversion; it turns against itself all the forces of public opinion and puts them on the side of justice.  Legal plunder, on the contrary, is perpetrated without troubling the conscience, and this cannot fail to weaken the moral fiber of a nation. –Essays, 134

See whether the law takes from some what belongs to them in order to give it to others to whom it does not belong.  We must see whether the law performs, for the profit of one citizen and to the detriment of others, an act which that citizen could not perform himself without being guilty of a crime.  Repeal such a law without delay.  It is not only an iniquity in itself; it is a fertile source of iniquities, because it invites reprisals, and if you do not take care, what begins by being an exception tends to become general, to multiply itself, and to develop into a veritable system. –Essays, 61

Legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways; hence, there are an infinite number of plans for organizing it:  tariffs, protection, bonuses, subsidies, incentives, the progressive income tax, free education, the right to employment, the right to profit, the right to wages, the right to relief, the right to the tools of production, interest free credit, etc., etc.  And it is the aggregate of all these plans, in respect to what they have in common, legal plunder, that goes under the name of socialism. –Essays, 61

Plunderers conform to the Malthusian law:  they multiply with the means of existence; and the means of existence of knaves is the credulity of their dupes.  Seek as one will, there is no substitute for an informed and enlightened public opinion.  It is the only remedy. –Sophisms, 139

The solution to the social problem lies in liberty. –Essays, 93
 
 

These quotes were taken from the four books of the collected writings of Frederic Bastiat, available from the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) at their online bookstore on their website.