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 HAYEKTo be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything.
More Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes
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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.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
If the human intellect is allowed to impose a preconceived pattern on society, if our powers of reasoning are allowed to lay claim to a monopoly of creative effort… then we must not be surprised if society, as such, ceases to function as a creative force.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
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 -
Few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and Nazism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.
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 -
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
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
[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 -
Humiliating to human pride as it may be, we must recognize that the advance and even the preservation of civilization are dependent upon a maximum of opportunity for accidents to happen.
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 -
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 -
[The] impersonal process of the market … can be neither just nor unjust, because the results are not intended or foreseen.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
By giving the government unlimited powers, the most arbitrary rule can be made legal; and in this way a democracy may set up the most complete despotism imaginable.
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.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
In government, the scum rises to the top.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
The chief evil is unlimited government, and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
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 -
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 -
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 -
This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
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.
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.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK