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 HAYEKIt 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 HAYEKOnce politics become a tug-of-war for shares in the income pie, decent government is impossible.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEKThe 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 HAYEKPerhaps 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 HAYEKIt would clearly not be an improvement to build all houses exactly alike in order to create a perfect market for houses, and the same is true of most other fields where differences between the individual products prevent competition from ever being perfect.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEKThe 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 HAYEKTo 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 HAYEKIt 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 HAYEKThe 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 HAYEKI 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 HAYEKFreedom necessarily means that many things will be done which we do not like.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEKCapitalism created the possibility of employment.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEKIf 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 HAYEKLiberty is an opportunity for doing good, but this is only so when it is also an opportunity for doing wrong.
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 HAYEKIt seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK