The freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEKBy 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.
More Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes
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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 -
Liberty”’.that condition of man in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as possible in society
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
Conservatism is only as good as what it conserves.
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 -
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 -
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.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
Without a theory the facts are silent.
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 -
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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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 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.
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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.
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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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Wherever liberty as we understand it has been destroyed, this has almost always been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people
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