In three years every Frenchman can know how to read. Do you think that we shall be the better off? Imagine on the other hand that in each commune, there was ONE bourgeois, only one, who had read Bastiat, and that this bourgeois was respected, things would change. Gustave Flaubert
Frederic Bastiat
Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else
government live fiction great
Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
places liberty life men mankind laws exist place fact made property lawandlawyers
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.
competition theend
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.
change society
change
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).
legal force harmony principles order peace death
By virtue of exchange, one man's prosperity is beneficial to all others.
virtues prosperity man
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?
rights liberty self
And what is liberty, whose very name makes the heart beat faster and shakes the world? Is it not the union of all liberties - liberty of conscience, of education, of association, of the press, of travel, or labor, or trade?
travel liberty labor conscience education
Each of us has a natural right, from God, to defend his person, his liberty, and his property.
rights liberty
In short, is not liberty the freedom of every person to make full use of his faculties, so long as he does not harm other persons while doing so?
liberty
Is not liberty the destruction of all despotism - including, of course, legal despotism?
legal liberty
Competition is merely the absence of oppression
competition absence
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