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. – Frederic Bastiat
Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. – Frederic Bastiat
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? – Frederic Bastiat
The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else. – Frederic Bastiat
By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber. – Henry David Thoreau