… is from page 434 of Liberty Fund’s 2011 collection of Frederic Bastiat’s writings, The Man and the Statesman: The Correspondence and Articles on Politics – which is the first volume in what will eventually be six volumes of The Collected Works of Frederic Bastiat; specifically, this quotation is from Bastiat’s 1848 essay “Laissez-faire”:
It is not that freedom has no disadvantages, since everything has these. To use these disadvantages in argument against it is to say to a man trapped in the mire: Do not get out, as you cannot do this without some effort.
