The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.
…for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.
Life, faculties, production-in other words, individuality, liberty, property-this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it.
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.
We need not be surprised at this. On a wrong road, inconsistency is inevitable; if it were not so, mankind would be sacrificed. A false principle never has been, and never will be, carried out to the end.
There are two principles between which there can be no compromise—liberty and coercion.
The law is guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish.
The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable.
I cannot possibly understand how fraternity can be legally enforced without liberty being legally destroyed…
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.
. . . for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.
Trade protection accumulates upon a single point the good which it effects, while the evil inflicted is infused throughout the mass. The one strikes the eye at a first glance, while the other becomes perceptible only to close investigation.