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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.

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

Book Country New People Two
[The] impersonal process of the market … can be neither just nor unjust, because the results are not intended or foreseen.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Justice Process Unjust
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
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
Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Inseparable Liberty Responsibility
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Design Liberty Men
The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before the law.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Law Liberty Struggle
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

Essentials Liberty Wish
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
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
That there is little hope of international order or lasting peace so long as every country is free to employ whatever measures it thinks desirable in its own immediate interest, however damaging they may be to others, needs little emphasis now.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Country Desirable Measure Order Thinking
The conservative feels safe and content only if he is assured that some higher wisdom watches and supervises change, only if he knows that some authority is charged with keeping the change “orderly.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Conservative Safe Watches
Conservatism is only as good as what it conserves.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Conservatism Conserves Good
[T]hose who are willing to surrender their freedom for security have always demanded that if they give up their full freedom it should also be taken from those not prepared to do so.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Giving Surrender Taken Up
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.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Ignorant Liberty Political Wisdom
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