22 quotes
The State is the great fiction through which everyone endeavours to live at the expense of everyone else.
The State in Journal des débats (1848)
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
Economic Sophisms (1845)
This is done now; we desire that it be done better.
Justice and Fraternity (1848)
The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.
Do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?
The Law (1850)
Competition is merely the absence of oppression.
Everyone's effort will be directed toward snatching a scrap of fraternal privilege from the legislature. The suffering classes, although having the greatest claim, will not always have the greatest success.
Justice and Fraternity (1848)
By virtue of exchange, one man's prosperity is beneficial to all others.
In the department of economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects.
Like a chemist, Napoleon considered all Europe to be material for his experiments. But in due course, this material reacted against him.
The profit of the one is the profit of the other.
When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.
The Law (1850)
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 try to force them to be self-sacrificing.
Justice and Fraternity (1848)
The most urgent necessity is, not that the State should teach, but that it should allow education. All monopolies are detestable, but the worst of all is the monopoly of education.
The Bastiat-Proudhon Debate on Interest (1849)
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.
The Law (1850)
Between a good and a bad economist this constitutes the whole difference: the one takes account only of the visible effect; the other takes account of both the effects which are seen and those which it is necessary to foresee.
It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.
The Law (1850)
If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?
The Law (1850)
It is a rather singular argument to maintain that, because an abuse which has been permitted a temporary existence, cannot be corrected without wounding the interests of those who have profited by it, it ought, therefore, to claim perpetual duration.
Economic Sophisms (1845)
When under the pretext of fraternity, the legal code imposes mutual sacrifices on the citizens, human nature is not thereby abrogated. Everyone will then direct his efforts toward contributing little to, and taking much from, the common fund of sacrifices. Now, is it the most unfortunate who gains from this struggle? Certainly not, but rather the most influential and calculating.
Justice and Fraternity (1848)