Frederic Bastiat Quotes

Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for SOME men to enslave OTHERS is a "sacred right of self-government." These principles can not stand together. They are as opposite as God and mammon; and whoever holds to the one, must despise the other.

I could not comprehend the justice of that law, or that religion, which upholds or recognizes the principle of slavery.

Not the Christian religion only, but nature herself, cries out against the state of slavery.

We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.

If a nation wishes, it can have both free elections and slavery.

The idea of "human rights," for example - sometimes it bothers me. Not in itself, but because the concept of human rights has replaced the much grander idea of justice.

We're living based on laws and ideas that we, as a society, embraced back in the days of slavery.

What I really want to write about is injustice and justice, and the different ways human beings organize the two.

The rights of some must not be enjoyed by denying the rights of others. Neither can we permit states' rights at the expense of human rights.

This is not a question of expediency, but of right. In antebellum days the proposition was not, “Are the blacks good enough to be free?” but, “Have they the right?” So today the question is not, “Will outrages result from freeing humanity?” but, “Has it the right to life, the means of life, the opportunities of happiness?”

One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

As long as the superstition that people should obey unjust laws exists, so long will slavery exist

Witness, eternal God! Oh, witness that, from this hour, I will do what one man can to drive out this curse of slavery from my land!

I pity from the bottom of my heart any nation or body of people that is so unfortunate as to get entangled in the net of slavery.

It's a collective truth that slavery is wrong, that child labor is wrong, that gross inequality is wrong. God didn't send it.

I recognize that in some cases it's more important to have freedom and justice than to have peace.

We're most likely to lose our rights when we allow ourselves to be persuaded to deprive others of theirs.

Justice is a fading light.

There are unprecedented numbers of movements for human rights and freedoms. But the dominant worldviews in academia, like materialism and naturalism, deny the reality of freedom, reducing humans to robots. So where does the concept of human rights come from?

It is better to have a war for justice than peace in injustice.

The oppression of a majority is detestable and odious; the oppression of a minority is only by one degree less detestable and odious.

In ten phrases, the ten commandments express the essential of life. And these three words--liberty, equality, and fraternity--do just as much. Millions of people have died for those ideals.

Whenever all men are...hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.

It is only by instigation of the wrongs of men that what are called the Rights of Man become turbulent and dangerous.