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 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.
More Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes
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The chief evil is unlimited government, and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power.
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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.
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With the exception only of the period of the gold standard, practically all governments of history have used their exclusive power to issue money to defraud and plunder the people.
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
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Many who think themselves infinitely superior to the aberrations of Nazism, and sincerely hate all manifestations, work at the same time for ideals whose realization would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny.
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[T]hose who are willing to surrender their freedom for security have always demanded that if they give up their full freedom it should also be taken from those not prepared to do so.
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.
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Freedom necessarily means that many things will be done which we do not like.
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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.
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This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals.
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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.
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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.
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[The] impersonal process of the market … can be neither just nor unjust, because the results are not intended or foreseen.
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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.
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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