…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 HAYEKIn no other field has the world yet paid so dearly for the abandonment of nineteenth-century liberalism as in the field where the retreat began: in international relations. Yet only a small part of the lesson which experience ought to have taught us has been learned.
More Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes
-
-
Socialism can only be put into practice only by methods which most socialists disapprove.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
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.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
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 -
If I am not mistaken, psychology, psychiatry and some branches of sociology, not to speak about the so-called philosophy of history, are even more affected by what I have called the scientistic prejudice, and by specious claims of what science can achieve.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
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 -
I have come to feel strongly that the greatest service I can still render to my fellow men would be that I could make the speakers and writers among them thoroughly ashamed ever again to employ the term “social justice.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
It is no accident that on the whole there was more beauty and decency to be found in the life of the small peoples, and that among the large ones there was more happiness and content in proportion as they had avoided the deadly blight of centralization.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
The moral consequences of totalitarian propaganda…are destructive of all morals because they undermind one of the foundations of all morals: the sense of and respect for truth.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
The mind cannot foresee its own advance.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
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 -
There is, in a competitive society, nobody who can exercise even a fraction of the power which a socialist planning board would possess.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
[The] impersonal process of the market … can be neither just nor unjust, because the results are not intended or foreseen.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
Liberty”’.that condition of man in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as possible in society
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK