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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

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
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
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

Important May Superstition
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

Advantage Freedom Principles
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 HAYEK

Important Majority Men
He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Growth Handwork Shapes
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

Democracy Giving Government
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

Class Mean Movement Philosophy Working
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
If I am not mistaken, psychology, psychiatry and some branches of sociology, not to speak about the so-called philosophy of history, are even more affected by what I have called the scientistic prejudice, and by specious claims of what science can achieve.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Philosophy Prejudice Psychology
Never will man penetrate deeper into error than when he is continuing on a road which has led him to great success
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Continuing Errors Men
It is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the intellectual that he judges new ideas not by their specific merits but by the readiness with which they fit into his general conceptions, into the picture of the world which he regards as modern or advanced.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Ideas Judging Philosophy
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
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

Creative Effort Monopoly Patterns
Nobody with open eyes can any longer doubt that the danger to personal freedom comes chiefly from the left.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Danger Doubt Eye
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 HAYEK

Effort Freedom Individual Mean
To create conditions in which competition will be as effective as possible, to prevent fraud and deception, to break up monopolies- these tasks provide a wide and unquestioned field for state activity.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Competition Deception Tasks
We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Done Foolish Much Stupid
Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Inseparable Liberty Responsibility
We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Justice Umpires Views
[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
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

Democracy Light Mean
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
If socialists understood economics, they wouldn’t be socialist.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Economics Politics Socialist
Freedom necessarily means that many things will be done which we do not like.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Done Mean Necessarily
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

Powerful Wealth World
Perhaps 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.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Freedom Generation Government Our