Frederic Bastiat Quotes

Power is every stealing from the many to the few.

We’d be crazy to let corporations get anywhere near our government. The only reason they want to influence government is to plunder—to steal from children.

The unambigious fact is that U.S. capitalism is a mechanism for looting the many for the benefit of the few.

The Few assume to be the deputies, but they are often only the despoilers of the Many.

Civilization degrades the many to exalt the few

Whatever is good for the People is bad for their Governors; and what is good for the Governors is pernicious for the People.

It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.

One must denounce the economic, financial, and social mechanisms and structures that are manipulated by the rich and powerful for their own benefit at the expense of the poor

Those who have by an unrighteous power made merchandise of the earth, giving all to some, & none to others, declare themselves tyranicall & usurping.

Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of plutocracy.

Ask of politicians the end for which laws were originally designed, and they will answer that the laws were designed as a protection for the poor and weak against the oppression of the rich and powerful. But surely no pretense can be so ridiculous

Representative democracy betrays the electorate when laws have no roots in the people but in oligarchies.

Rugged individualism really means the regimentation of the many for the benefit of the few.

Money doesn't just buy a nice car; it also buys better education or healthcare. Increasingly, it can buy impunity from justice, a pliant media, favorable laws, business advantage, and even elections. This, in turn, perpetuates the policies that allow a tiny elite to accumulate ever more wealth at the expense of the majority.

If fifty men did all the work, / And gave the price to five, / And let those five make all the rules - / You'd say the fifty men were fools, / Unfit to be alive.

Money and corruption are ruining the land, crooked politicians betray the working man, pocketing the profits and treating us like sheep, and we're tired of hearing promises that we know they'll never keep.

Face it, the system is rigged, and it's rigged against us.

But after the spirit of conquest had changed the first governments, all the succeeding ones have, in general, proved one continued series of injustice, which has reigned in all countries for almost four thousand years.

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.

Washing dishes as a 17-year-old in an Oxford college and seeing the privileged lifestyles of the undergraduates there convinced me that a system that allowed luxury for the few at the expense of the many needed to be challenged.

America's corporate and political elites now form a regime of their own and they're privatizing democracy. All the benefits - the tax cuts, policies and rewards flow in one direction: up.

The new elites have no allegiances to nation states and don't care about the damage they do to workers, the environment, or the rest of humanity. They are unhinged sociopaths, far removed from what the Occupy Movement called the '99 percent.'

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few.

I believe that cronyism is nothing more than welfare for the rich and powerful, and should be abolished.

In our political system, money is power. And that means a few can have a lot more power than the rest. That's bad news for everyone else - and for our democracy itself.