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 HAYEKNo human mind can comprehend all the knowledge which guides the actions of society.
More Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes
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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 -
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 -
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 -
Conservatism is only as good as what it conserves.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.
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 -
We must shed the illusion that we can deliberately “create the future of mankind.” This is the final conclusion of the forty years which I have now devoted to the study of these problems
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.
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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 -
As is true with respect to other great evils, the measures by which war might be made altogether impossible for the future may well be worse than even war itself.
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The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess.
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To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything.
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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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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 -
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.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
If socialists understood economics, they wouldn’t be socialist.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
…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.
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Never will man penetrate deeper into error than when he is continuing on a road which has led him to great success
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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 -
Freedom necessarily means that many things will be done which we do not like.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion.
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 -
Once politics become a tug-of-war for shares in the income pie, decent government is impossible.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
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.
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Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.
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The chief evil is unlimited government, and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK