Frederic Bastiat Quotes

The rights of all of us are diminished when the rights of any one of us are threatened.

However insignificant the minority, and however trifling the proposed trespass against their rights, no such trespass is permissible.

The public good is in nothing more essentially interested, than in the protection of every individual’s private rights.

People have rights and government must be kept from trampling on them.

It is to secure our rights that we resort to government at all.

There is no declaration of rights … the declaration of rights in the separate states are no security

Freedom can be preserved only if it is treated as a supreme principle which must not be sacrificed for particular advantages.

I have a personal belief that you never have to give up liberty for security. You can still provide security without sacrificing our Bill of Rights.

Where no individual in a community is denied his rights, the mass are the more perfectly protected in theirs; for whenever any class is subject to fraud or injustice, it shows that the spirit of tyranny is at work, and no one can tell where or how or when the infection will spread.

My feeling is that whatever people elect to do, insofar as they don't deny the rights of others, every effort should be made to defend their right to do it.

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority.

In a free society, individuals have the right to do right or wrong, as long as they don't threaten or infringe upon the rights or property of others.

Free institutions are not the property of any majority. They do not confer upon majorities unlimited powers. The rights of the majority are limited rights. They are limited not only by the constitutional guarantees but by the moral principle implied in those guarantees. That principle is that men may not use the facilities of liberty to impair them. No man may invoke a right in order to destroy it.

A democratic government that respects no limits on its power is a ticking time bomb, waiting to destroy the rights it was created to protect.

Historically, the court has been the forum to which individuals can turn when they believed their constitutional rights were violated. This has been especially noteworthy in the arena of civil rights.

It is sufficiently obvious, that persons and property are the two great subjects on which Governments are to act; and that the rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted. These rights cannot well be separated.

Whoever defends his own rights defends the rights of all.

The only stable principle of government is equality according to proportion, and for every man to enjoy his own.

Principle III: Presumptive rights are the conditions under which individual powers normally develop.

It is not that you set the individual apart from society but that you recognize in any society that the individual must have rights that are guarded.

The mass of the citizens is the safest depositary of their own rights.

I insist that people - wherever they live - have their rights and they must be able to fight for them.

We don't have rights until we claim them.

A clear enunciation of these rights needs to be enshrined in the constitution to guarantee that this basic right of law-abiding gun owners and sportsmen shall not be infringed upon by anti-gun public officials.