Each of us has a natural right, from God, to defend his person, his liberty, and his property.
Interpretation
The quote expresses the inherent rights of individuals to protect themselves and their possessions.
Frederic Bastiat's quote highlights the philosophical principle that individuals are endowed with natural rights by virtue of their existence. This signifies that every person has the fundamental entitlement to safeguard their own life, freedom, and property, which he argues is a divine right. The assertion reflects a strong belief in personal responsibility and the importance of self-defense in the context of individual liberty.
In practice
This quote can be used to emphasize the need for self-defense in a debate about individual rights.
The state tends to expand in proportion to its means of existence and to live beyond its means, and these are, in the last analysis, nothing but the substance of the people. Woe to the people that cannot limit the sphere of action of the state! Freedom, private enterprise, wealth, happiness, independence, personal dignity, all vanish.
Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on.
No society can exist if respect for the law does not to some extent prevail; but the surest way to have the laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality are in contradiction, the citizen finds himself in the cruel dilemma of either losing his moral sense or of losing respect for the law, two evils of which one is as great as the other, and between which it is difficult to choose.
The law is the collective organization of the individual's right to lawful defense of his life, liberty and property. When it is used for anything else, no matter how noble the cause, it becomes perverted and justice is weakened. Thus, the law has become perverted by stupid greed and false philanthropy.
If you wish to prosper, let your customer prosper.
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.
Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile; Filths savour but themselves.
Asking who won a given war, someone has said, is like asking who won the San Francisco earthquake. That in war there is no victory but only varying degrees of defeat is a proposition that has gained increasing acceptance in the twentieth century.
The work of woman is not to lessen the severity or the certainty of the penalty for the violation of the moral law, but to prevent this violation by the removal of the causes which lead to it.
You find no difficulty in trusting the Lord with the management of the universe and all the outward creation, and can your case be any more complex or difficult than these, that you need to be anxious or troubled about His management of it?
Man's life is like a drop of dew on a leaf.
there was something about that city, though it didn't let me feel guilty that I had no feeling for the things so many others needed. it let me alone.
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