It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEKPerhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one’s government is not necessarily to secure freedom.
More Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes
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In government, the scum rises to the top.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
In no other field has the world yet paid so dearly for the abandonment of nineteenth-century liberalism as in the field where the retreat began: in international relations. Yet only a small part of the lesson which experience ought to have taught us has been learned.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
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?
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 -
When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.
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 -
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 -
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 -
Nobody with open eyes can any longer doubt that the danger to personal freedom comes chiefly from the left.
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 -
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 -
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 -
Hayek was making us think of the productive process as a process in time, inputs coming before outputs.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
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 -
To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK