Frederic Bastiat Quotes

A man’s right to his job transcends the right of private property.

The laboring people should unite and should protect themselves against all idlers. You can divide mankind into two classes: the laborers and the idlers, the supporters and the supported, the honest and the dishonest. Every man is dishonest who lives upon the unpaid labor of others, no matter if he occupies a throne. All laborers should be brothers.

To secure to each laborer the whole product of his labor, or as nearly as possible, is a worthy object of any good government.

And my approach has always been to stand up and speak out on behalf of the economic rights of people.

As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest.

America's leaders need to put their feet in the shoes of working Americans.

So I will stand more steadfastly for the things I stand up for, like people who work for a living. I'd like to be able to stand that way when I go to Congress.

It is because the fight against the harshest aspects of unrestricted capitalism is therefore a political problem and not an intellectual one that community action remains so essential.

He mocks the people who proposes that the government shall protect the rich and that they in turn will care for the laboring poor.

I am always on the side of labor when there is any compromise to be made.

It has happened, in all ages of the world, that some have labored and others have, without labor, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong and should not continue. To secure to each laborer the whole product of his labor, or as nearly as possible, is a worthy object of any good government. That's my platform, but when the average Republican leader in the East hears it, he thinks I am quoting from Karl Marx. I did quote it, but not from Karl Marx. I quoted it from Abraham Lincoln.

It is a sad commentary upon our form of government when every decision of the Supreme Court seems designed to fatten capital and starve and destroy labor.

As labor is the common burden of our race so the effort of some to shift their share of the burden on to the shoulders of others is the great durable curse of the race.

What the labor movement did in this country is to make sure that capitalism worked.

I, however, wished to win over the soul of the German workingman, and I fought zealously to attain this goal. I was filled with the consciousness of a plain duty and responsibility toward my entire people--also, therefore, toward the laboring classes. What was theirs by right and justice should become theirs, I thought; moreover, I believed that this should be brought about, wherever the will or power of the employers ceased, by the lord of the land and his government, in so far as justice or necessity demanded. As soon as I had recognized the necessity for reforms, to some of which the industrial elements would not consent, I took up the cudgels for the laboring classes, impelled by a sense of justice.

It is impossible to place labor and capital in harmonious or friendly relations, except by the means of slavery

For the first time in the life of the great republic, there was a political organization which grappled directly and fundamentally with the growing injustice which marked the dealings between Exploiters and the Exploited

“A fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work,” is as just a demand as governed men ever made of governing; yet in what corner of this planet was that ever realized?

It would be well for those interested to reflect whether there now exists, or ever has existed, a wealthy and civilized community in which one portion did not live on the labor of another.... Remember that labor is the only source of wealth, and how small a portion of it, in all old and civilized countries, even the best governed, is left to those by whose labor wealth is created.

In some countries the laboring poor were called freemen and in others they were called slaves but that the difference of the state was imaginary only…. the condition of the laboring poor in most countries, that of the fishermen particularly in the Northern states, is as abject as that of slaves.

I believe in corporations. I believe in trade unions. Both have come to stay and are necessities in our present industrial system, But where, either one or the other, there develops corruption or mere brutal indifference to the rights of others … then the offender, whether union or corporation, must be fought.

Allowing slavery will starve the poor white laborer.

During Black History Month, I'm reminded yet again of the ways that the struggle for civil rights is interwoven with the struggle for workers' rights.

We need to see the FLSA and the minimum wage as part of a larger struggle to cut poverty and to address the challenge of income inequality.

Historians have often censored civil rights activists' commitment to economic issues and misrepresented the labor and civil rights movements as two separate, sometimes adversarial efforts. But civil rights and workers' rights are two sides of the same coin.