Liberty”’.that condition of man in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as possible in society
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEKEmergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.
More Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes
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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 -
Liberty is an opportunity for doing good, but this is only so when it is also an opportunity for doing wrong.
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In government, the scum rises to the top.
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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.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
Freedom can be preserved only if it is treated as a supreme principle which must not be sacrificed for particular advantages.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
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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The chief evil is unlimited government, and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power.
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 -
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 -
Capitalism created the possibility of employment.
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If democracy is a means rather than an end, its limits must be determined in the light of the purpose we want it to serve.
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The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before the law.
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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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And who will deny that a world in which the wealthy are powerful is still a better world than one in which only the already powerful can acquire wealth?
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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.
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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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When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.
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All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest.
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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.
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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.
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Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement. It is by no means an obvious remedy for the obvious evil which the interests of that class will necessarily demand. It is a construction of theorists.
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To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything.
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The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
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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.
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We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.
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It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK