No human mind can comprehend all the knowledge which guides the actions of society.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEKIf the human intellect is allowed to impose a preconceived pattern on society, if our powers of reasoning are allowed to lay claim to a monopoly of creative effort… then we must not be surprised if society, as such, ceases to function as a creative force.
More Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes
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Justice, like liberty and coercion, is a concept which, for the sake of clarity, ought to be confined to the deliberate treatment of men by other men.
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It can hardly be denied that such a demand quite arbitrarily limits the facts which are to be admitted as possible causes of the events which occur in the real world.
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Freedom can be preserved only if it is treated as a supreme principle which must not be sacrificed for particular advantages.
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[The] impersonal process of the market … can be neither just nor unjust, because the results are not intended or foreseen.
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Wherever liberty as we understand it has been destroyed, this has almost always been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people
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Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarianism which horrify us follow of necessity
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It would clearly not be an improvement to build all houses exactly alike in order to create a perfect market for houses, and the same is true of most other fields where differences between the individual products prevent competition from ever being perfect.
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Once wide coercive powers are given to governmental agencies for particular purposes, such powers cannot be effectively controlled by democratic assemblies.
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By the time any view becomes a majority view, it is no longer the best view: somebody will already have advanced beyond the point which the majority have reached.
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Few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and Nazism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.
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By giving the government unlimited powers, the most arbitrary rule can be made legal; and in this way a democracy may set up the most complete despotism imaginable.
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Capitalism created the possibility of employment.
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The chief evil is unlimited government, and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power.
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When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.
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It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK