“Planning other people’s actions means to prevent them from planning for themselves, means to deprive them of their essentially human quality, means enslaving them.”

Liberty is always freedom from the government.

The fundamental law of the market is: the customer is always right.

The entrepreneurs, the capitalists and the technologists prosper as far as they succeed in best supplying the consumers.

Economic progress is the work of the savers, who accumulate capital, and of the entrepreneurs, who turn capital to new uses.

The market is a democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote.

What pushes the masses into the camp of socialism is, even more than the illusion that socialism will make them richer, the expectation that it will curb all those who are better than they themselves are.

The standard of living of the common man is higher in those countries which have the greatest number of wealthy entrepreneurs.

The Welfare State is merely a method for transforming the market economy step by step into socialism.

The causes of all panics, crashes and depressions can be summed up in only four words: the misuse of credit.

The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments.

The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion.

Capitalism needs neither propaganda nor apostles. Its achievements speak for themselves. Capitalism delivers the goods.

What mankind needs today is liberation from the rule of nonsensical slogans and a return to sound reasoning.

The truth is that most people lack the intellectual ability and courage to resist a popular movement, however pernicious and ill-considered.

The root of the evil is not the construction of new, more dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest.

The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning.

The life before ’68 was very different from the life after ’68. Before ’68, our days were full of authoritarian moments. There were authorities everywhere. In fact, the movement of ’68 was young people against their authorities, children against their parents. And that remained.

Private property creates for the individual a sphere in which he is free of the state. It sets limits to the operation of the authoritarian will.

How could I stand the separation from family and friends? It is ironic, I say, that in an authoritarian state it is only the prisoner of conscience who is genuinely free. Yes, we have given up our right to a normal life. But we have stayed true to that most precious part of our humanity-our conscience.

A part of society in our countries would still prefer an authoritarian regime today. These are people with the mentality of Homo sovieticus. But they also exist in France – just think of Le Pen – and even in Finland and Sweden.