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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.

Friedrich August von Hayek

It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only those individuals know.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Individual Problem Use
If socialists understood economics, they wouldn’t be socialist.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Economics Politics Socialist
I was quite depressed two weeks ago when I spent an afternoon at Brentano’s Bookshop in New York and was looking at the kind of books most people read. That seems to be hopeless; once you see that you lose all hope.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Book Country New People Two
Capitalism created the possibility of employment.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Capitalism Employment Possibility
Should our moral beliefs really prove to be dependent on factual assumptions shown to be incorrect, it would be hardly moral to defend them by refusing to acknowledge the facts.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Assumptions Beliefs Facts Moral
Without a theory the facts are silent.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Facts Silent Theory
The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the “wrong” beliefs.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Faith Government Thinking
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.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Justice Liberty Men
Liberty is an opportunity for doing good, but this is only so when it is also an opportunity for doing wrong.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Doing Good Liberty Opportunity
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.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Essence Law People
Humiliating to human pride as it may be, we must recognize that the advance and even the preservation of civilization are dependent upon a maximum of opportunity for accidents to happen.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Civilization Opportunity Pride
Many who think themselves infinitely superior to the aberrations of Nazism, and sincerely hate all manifestations, work at the same time for ideals whose realization would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Aberration Hate Thinking
There may be few instances in which the superstition that only measurable magnitudes can be important has done positive harm in the economic field: but the present inflation and employment problems are a very serious one.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Important May Superstition
…the case for individual freedom rests largely on the recognition of the inevitable and universal ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievements of our ends and welfare depend.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Achievement Ignorance Liberty
It is neither necessary nor desirable that national boundaries should mark sharp differences in standards of living, that membership of a national group should entitle to a share in a cake altogether different from that in which members of other groups share.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Cake Differences Membership
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
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Ends Individual Mean