Frederic Bastiat

They will come to learn in the end, at their own expense, that it is better to endure competition for rich customers than to be invested with monopoly over impoverished customers.

Finally, is not liberty the restricting of the law only to its rational sphere of organizing the right of the individual to lawful self-defense; of punishing injustice?

When goods do not cross borders, soldiers will.

By virtue of exchange one mans prosperity is beneficial to all others.

Liberty is an acknowledgement of faith in God and His works.

In short, is not liberty the freedom of every person to make full use of his faculties, so long as he does not harm other persons while doing so?

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

Each of us has a natural right, from God, to defend his person, his liberty, and his property.

The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.

If goods don't cross borders, armies will.

Competition is merely the absence of oppression.

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.

And what is liberty, whose very name makes the heart beat faster and shakes the world? Is it not the union of all liberties - liberty of conscience, of education, of association, of the press, of travel, or labor, or trade?

Either fraternity is spontaneous or it does not exist. To decree it is to annihilate it. The law can indeed force men to remain just in vain would it would try to force them to be self sacrificing.

Is not liberty the destruction of all despotism - including, of course, legal despotism?

Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.

Often the masses are plundered and do not know it.