F. A . Hayek
Quotes
Economist and philosopher
Economic Liberty
"The mind cannot foresee its own advance."
"The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before the law."
"Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement."
"The more the state “plans” the more difficult planning becomes for the individual."
"Our moral traditions developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product."
"Where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation."
"No human mind can comprehend all the knowledge which guides the actions of society."
"We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish."
"The chief evil is unlimited government, and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power."
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers."
"We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage."
"Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom."
"There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal."
"'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded."
"What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free."
"Nobody with open eyes can any longer doubt that the danger to personal freedom comes chiefly from the left."
"Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong."
"We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice."
"I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice."
"The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments."
"I do not think it is an exaggeration to say history is largely a history of inflation, usually inflations engineered by governments for the gain of governments."
"If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion."
"Once wide coercive powers are given to governmental agencies for particular purposes, such powers cannot be effectively controlled by democratic assemblies."
"It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide."
"What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not."
"Why should we, however, in economics, have to plead ignorance of the sort of facts on which, in the case of a physical theory, a scientist would certainly be expected to give precise information?"
"Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions.... Liberty and responsibility are inseparable."
"Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom."
"To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm."
"It is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism."
"To discover the meaning of what is called 'social justice' has been one of my chief preoccupations for more than 10 years. I have failed in this endeavour — or rather, have reached the conclusion that, with reference to society of free men, the phrase has no meaning whatever."
"It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regards as the public good."
"Inflation is probably the most important single factor in that vicious circle wherein one kind of government action makes more and more government control necessary. For this reason all those who wish to stop the drift toward increasing government control should concentrate their effort on monetary policy."
"That democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something so utterly different that few of those who wish it would be prepared to accept the consequences, many will not believe until the connection has been laid bare in all its aspects."
"Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rates higher and which lower, in short, what men should believe and strive for."
"When we ask what ought to be the relative remunerations of a nurse or a butcher, or a coal miner and a judge at a high court, of the deep sea diver of the cleaner of sewers, of the organiser of a new industry and a jockey, of the inspector of taxes and the inventor of a life-saving drug, of the jet-pilot or the professor of mathematics, the appeal to 'social justice' does not give us the slightest help in deciding…"
"To rest the case for equal treatment of national or racial minorities on the assumption that they do not differ from other men is implicitly to admit that factual inequality would justify unequal treatment, and the proof that some differences do, in fact, exist would not be long in forthcoming. It is of the essence of the demand for equality before the law that people should be treated alike in spite of the fact that they are different."
"What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that nobody has complete power over us, that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves."
"At first everyone will seek for himself what seems to him the best path. But the fact that such a path has been used once is likely to make it easier to traverse and therefore more likely to be used again; and thus gradually more and more clearly defined tracks arise and come to be used to the exclusion of other possible ways. Human movements through the region come to conform to a definite pattern which, although the result of deliberate decision of many people, has yet not be consciously designed by anyone."
Compiled by Thomas George
editor@Liberty-vs-Tyranny.com/
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