[T]o curse machines is to curse the spirit of humanity.
Categories
Category: Thought
Categories
Frédéric Bastiat
The Socialists say, since the law organizes justice, why should it not organize labor, instruction, and religion?
Why? Because it could not organize labor, instruction, and religion, without disorganizing justice.
Categories
Frédéric Bastiat
Partial plunder, universal plunder, absence of plunder, amongst these we have to make our choice. The law can only produce one of these results.
Categories
Frédéric Bastiat
If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?
Categories
Frédéric Bastiat
Men are not fed on money. They do not clothe themselves with gold, or warm themselves with silver. What does it matter whether there is more or less money in the country if there is more bread on our sideboards, more meat in our larders, more linen in our wardrobes, more firewood in our cellars?
Categories
Frédéric Bastiat
To level and equalize the conditions of labor is not simply to cramp exchanges in certain branches of trade; it is to attack exchange in its principle, for its principle rests upon that very diversity, upon those very inequalities of fertility, aptitude, climate and temperature, that you desire to efface.
Categories
Frédéric Bastiat
In a state of isolation, our wants exceed our powers; in consequence of Exchange, our powers exceed our wants.
Categories
Frédéric Bastiat
Is Law to enforce rigorous Justice, or to be the instrument of Spoliation, organized with more or less adroitness?
Frédéric Bastiat, The Law (1850).
The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained.