It must be admitted that the tendency of the human race toward liberty is largely thwarted, especially in France. This is greatly due to a fatal desirelearned from the teachings of antiquitythat our writers on public affairs have in common They desire to set themselves above mankind in order to arrange, organize, and regulate it according to their fancy.
More Quotes from Claude Frédéric Bastiat:
Law is justice. And it is under the law of justice under the reign of right under the influence of liberty, safety, stability, and responsibility that every person will attain his real worth and the true dignity of his being. It is only under this law of justice that mankind will achieve slowly, no doubt, but certainly Gods design for the orderly and peaceful progress of humanity.Claude Frédéric Bastiat
But when the law, by means of its necessary agent, force, imposes upon men a regulation of labor, a method or a subject of education, a religious faith or creed then the law is no longer negative it acts positively upon people. It substitutes the will of the legislator for their own wills, the initiative of the legislator for their own initiatives. When this happens, the people no longer need to discuss, to compare and to plan ahead the law does all this for them. Intelligence becomes a useless prop for the people they cease to be men they lose their personality, their liberty, their property.
Claude Frédéric Bastiat
The mind never fully accepts any convictions that it does not owe to its own efforts.
Claude Frédéric Bastiat
People are beginning to realize that the apparatus of government is costly. But what they do not know is that the burden falls inevitably on them.
Claude Frédéric Bastiat
The state is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else.
Claude Frédéric Bastiat
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Based on Topics: Liberty & Freedom Quotes, Mankind QuotesBased on Keywords: thwarted
Little do such men know the toil, the pains, the daily, nightly racking of the brains, to range the thoughts, the matter to digest, to cull fit phrases, and reject the rest.
Charles Churchill
If my parents had discouraged me, I would have turned out very differently. They raised me in an open-minded, liberal environment.
Tom Ford
Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write.
J. B. Priestley