… is from page 431 of Liberty Fund’s 2011 collection of Frédéric Bastiat’s writings, The Man and the Statesman: The Correspondence and Articles on Politics – which is the first volume in what, hopefully, will eventually be six volumes, all expertly edited by David Hart, of The Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat:
[I]t would be puerile to expect the human heart to be other than it has pleased nature to make it.
DBx: People’s tastes, knowledge, ideas, expectations, understanding, and values can and do change. But at the bottom of it all there is a real and permanent human nature – a human nature that no amount of teaching, preaching, or politicking can possibly alter.