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 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.
More Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes
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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 -
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 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 -
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 -
Conservatism is only as good as what it conserves.
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 -
It 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 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] impersonal process of the market … can be neither just nor unjust, because the results are not intended or foreseen.
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 -
It is of the essence of the demand for equality before the law that people should be treated alike in spite of the fact that they are different.
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 -
If socialists understood economics, they wouldn’t be socialist.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
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 -
We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.
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 -
The mind cannot foresee its own advance.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
No human mind can comprehend all the knowledge which guides the actions of society.
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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