Quotations by Bastiat on the State and the Free Market

Source: Quotations about Liberty and Power

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The following quotations from Bastiat's works have appeared in the Online Library of Liberty's collection of Quotations about Liberty and Power:

• Bastiat on the most universally useful freedom, namely to work and to trade (1847)
• Bastiat on the spirit of free trade as a reform of the mind itself (1847)
• Bastiat on the state vs. laissez-faire (1848)
• Bastiat on the many freedoms that make up liberty (1848)
• Bastiat on the scramble for political office (1848)
• Bastiat on the need for urgent political and economic reform (1848)
• Bastiat on the fact that even in revolution there is an indestructible principle of order in the human heart (1848)
• Bastiat asks the fundamental question of political economy: what should be the size of the state? (1850)
• Bastiat on the state as the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else (1848)
• Bastiat, while pondering the nature of war, concluded that society had always been divided into two classes - those who engaged in productive work and those who lived off their backs (1850)

For further Reading see the new translation by Liberty Fund of the Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat:

• The Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat. Vol. 1: The Man and the Statesman: The Correspondence and Articles on Politics, translated from the French by Jane and Michel Willems, with an introduction by Jacques de Guenin and Jean-Claude Paul-Dejean. Annotations and Glossaries by Jacques de Guenin, Jean-Claude Paul-Dejean, and David M. Hart. Translation editor Dennis O’Keeffe (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2011). </title/2393>