1
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.Unknown
2
In fact, if law were restricted to protecting all persons, all liberties, and all properties; if law were nothing more than the organized combination of the individual's right to self-defense; if law were the obstacle, the check, the punisher of all oppression and plunder – is it likely that we citizens would then argue much about the extent of the franchise?Unknown
3
There is in all of us a strong disposition to regard what is lawful as legitimate, so much so that many falsely derive all justice from law. It is sufficient, then, for the law to order and sanction plunder, that it may appear to many consciences just and sacred. Slavery, protection, and monopoly find defenders, not only in those who profit by them, but in those who suffer by them. If you suggest a doubt as to the morality of these institutions, it is said directly–“ You are a dangerous experimenter, a utopian, a theorist, a despiser of the laws; you would shake the basis upon which society rests. .Unknown
4
I cannot possibly understand how fraternity can be legally enforced without liberty being legally destroyed...Unknown
5
.. . for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.Unknown
6
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.Unknown
7
I do not think that illegal plunder, such as theft or swindling – which the penal code defines, anticipates, and punishes – can be called socialism. It is not this kind of plunder that systematically threatens the foundations of society. Anyway, the war against this kind of plunder has not waited for the command of these gentlemen. The war against illegal plunder has been fought since the beginning of the world. Long before the Revolution of February 1848 – long before the appearance even of socialism itself – France had provided police, judges, gendarmes, prisons, dungeons, and scaffolds for the purpose of fighting illegal plunder. The law itself conducts this war, and it is my wish and opinion that the law should always maintain this attitude toward plunder.Unknown
8
One of the strangest phenomena of our time, and one that will probably be a matter of astonishment to our decedents, is that doctrine which is founded upon this triple hypothesis: the radical passiveness of mankind, -the omnipotence of the law, -the infallibility of the legislature: this is the sacred symbol of the party that proclaims itself exclusively democratic.Unknown
9
We disapprove of state education. Than the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Than the socialists say that we don't want an religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Than they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.Unknown
10
In the first place, it would efface from everybody’sconscience the distinction between justice and injustice. No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a cer-tain degree, but the safest way to make them respected isto make them respectable. When law and morality are incontradiction to each other, the citizen finds himself inthe cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or oflosing his respect for the law–two evils of equal magni-tude, between which it would be difficult to choose.Unknown