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 HAYEKNobody with open eyes can any longer doubt that the danger to personal freedom comes chiefly from the left.
More Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes
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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 -
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 -
Justice, like liberty and coercion, is a concept which, for the sake of clarity, ought to be confined to the deliberate treatment of men by other men.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
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 -
It can hardly be denied that such a demand quite arbitrarily limits the facts which are to be admitted as possible causes of the events which occur in the real world.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK -
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 -
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 -
Few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and Nazism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.
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 -
The mind cannot foresee its own advance.
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 -
The chief evil is unlimited government, and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power.
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 -
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 -
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







