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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.

Friedrich August von Hayek

It used to be the boast of free men that, so long as they kept within the bounds of the known law, there was no need to ask anybody’s permission or to obey anybody’s orders. It is doubtful whether any of us can make this claim today.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Men Order Responsibility
To create conditions in which competition will be as effective as possible, to prevent fraud and deception, to break up monopolies- these tasks provide a wide and unquestioned field for state activity.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Competition Deception Tasks
The attitude of the liberal towards society is like that of the gardener who tends a plant and, in order to create the conditions most favorable to its growth, must know as much as possible about its structure and the way it functions.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Attitude Growth Order
The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Economics Individual Men
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

Effort Freedom Individual Mean
The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before the law.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Law Liberty Struggle
Once wide coercive powers are given to governmental agencies for particular purposes, such powers cannot be effectively controlled by democratic assemblies.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Agency Assembly Purpose
I am certain, however, that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Freedom Justice Mirages
Perhaps even more than elsewhere current notions of what is desirable and practicable are here still of a kind which may well produce the opposite of what they promise.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

May Opposites Promise
We shall never prevent the abuse of power if we are not prepared to limit power in a way which occasionally may prevent its use for desirable purposes.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Abuse Desirable May Occasionally Purpose
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.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Causes Limits Real
Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Historical Liberty War
Hayek was making us think of the productive process as a process in time, inputs coming before outputs.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Input Thinking Time
When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Democracy Politics Power
If socialists understood economics, they wouldn’t be socialist.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Economics Politics Socialist
He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Growth Handwork Shapes