Frederic Bastiat Quotes

They're not leading our people toward any kind of independence, but they're using their positions and their education and their talent to exploit our people worse than the slave master did during slavery.

Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.

I don't want to live in a nanny state where people are telling me where I can go and what I can do.

Whenever regulation increases, personal freedom decreases.

Give a man a free hand and he'll run it all over you.

To maintain this Separation (from England) is to maintain the Religion, Liberty and Property of ourselves and our Posterity; to renounce it is to Sink into the lowest meanness and Slavery. May God remove every such thought from every American Breast! Welcome first the Life of the most uncivilized Savages! Welcome Death itself and everlasting Oblivion to our race!

Slavery and tariffs. These are the only two issues where, contrary to the general spirit of the republic of the United States, law has assumed the character of plunder. Slavery is a violation, by law, of liberty. The protective tariff is a violation, by law, of property.

I have the right to determine who shall be my mate without the permission of any man. I am not a slave.

Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress that can beguile the brain and soul of man.

We can restore liberty by taking government out of our bedrooms, our bloodstreams, our bladders, our brains, our businesses and our back-pockets.

Your longed-for liberty cannot be decreed right away, as humanity and reason would wish, because unfortunately it stands in opposition to the sacred right of individual liberty of slaveholders in their property rights.

We have been told that…Britain is the mother and we are the children, that a filial duty and submission is due from us to her and that we ought to doubt our own judgment and presume that she is right, even when she seems to us to shake the foundations of government. But admitting we are children, have not children a right to complain when their parents are attempting to break their limbs, to administer poison, or to sell them to enemies for slaves?

Liberty is the greatest blessing that men enjoy, and slavery is the heaviest curse that human nature is capable of …. those who are governed at the will of another, and whose property may be taken from them...without their consent...are in the miserable condition of slaves.

Security is no replacement for liberty.

Whenever you hear, “it’s for your own good” from the government, you are about to lose some money or freedom. Always!

It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY.

When I was a boy, the priest, my uncle, carefully inculcated upon me this proverb, which I then learned and have ever since kept in my mind: 'Dico tibi verum, Libertas optima rerum; Nunquam servili, sub nexu vivito, fili.' 'I tell you a truth: Liberty is the best of things, my son; never live under any slavish bond.'

We are free today because we are the stronger; we will be slaves again when the government becomes the stronger.

If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making?

It is true that liberty is not free, nor is it easy. But tyranny - even varying degrees of it - is much more difficult, and much more expensive. The time has come to rein in the federal government, put it on a crash diet, and let the people keep their money and their liberty.

Liberty is one of the most precious gifts which heaven has bestowed on man; with it we cannot compare the treasures which the earth contains or the sea conceals; for liberty, as for honor, we can and ought to risk our lives; and, on for the other hand, captivity is the greatest evil that can befall man.

You really don't create an authoritarian society unless you control the personal choices including the sexual choices of the people.

Tyranny is the exercise of some power over a man, which is not warranted by law, or necessary for the public safety. A people can never be deprived of their liberties, while they retain in their own hands, a power sufficient to any other power in the state.

What do we want for people? Human dignity, personal expression and fulfillment, justice, freedom.