Friedrich August Von Hayek Quotes

The idea of social justice is that the state should treat different people unequally in order to make them equal.

If socialists understood economics, they wouldn't be socialist.

There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.

'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

[Socialistic] economic planning, regulation, and intervention pave the way to totalitarianism by building a power structure that will inevitably be seized by the most power-hungry and unscrupulous.

In government, the scum rises to the top.

Social justice rests on the hate towards those that enjoy a comfortable position, namely, upon envy.

The more the state "plans" the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.

It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil.

The chief evil is unlimited government, and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power.

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.

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.

A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.

[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.

Nobody with open eyes can any longer doubt that the danger to personal freedom comes chiefly from the left.

Conservatism is only as good as what it conserves.

Freedom can be preserved only if it is treated as a supreme principle which must not be sacrificed for particular advantages.

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.

It seems to be almost a law of human nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative program - on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off - than on any positive task.

It is when it is contended that "in a democracy right is what the majority makes it to be" that democracy degenerates into demagoguery.

The 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.

Socialism can only be put into practice only by methods which most socialists disapprove.

Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.

We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.

We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.

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.

The state itself becomes more and more identified with the interests of those who run things than with the interests of the people in general.

The idea that human kind can shape the world according to wish is what I call the fatal conceit

Through the inevitable mismanagement of resources and goods at the disposal of the state, all forms of collectivism lead eventually to tyranny.

To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything.

It 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.

I do not think it is an exaggeration to say history is largely a history of inflation, usually inflations engineered by governments for the gain of governments.

No human mind can comprehend all the knowledge which guides the actions of society.

This means that to entrust to science - or to deliberate control according to scientific principles - more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects.

Wherever liberty as we understand it has been destroyed, this has almost always been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people

The [classical] liberal, of course, does not deny that there are some superior people -- he is not an egalitarian -- but he denies that anyone has authority to decide who these superior people are.

Any man who is only an economist is unlikely to be a good one.

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.

Nothing is more securely lodged than the ignorance of the experts.

The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the "wrong" beliefs.

We must raise and train an army of fighters for freedom.

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?

Liberty is an opportunity for doing good, but this is only so when it is also an opportunity for doing wrong.

We shall never prevent the abuse of power if we are not prepared to limit power in a way which occasionally may prevent its use for desirable purposes.

We can either have a free Parliament or a free people. Personal freedom requires that all authority is restrained by long-run principles which the opinion of the people approves.

A society that does not recognise that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom.

I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it.

Nothing distinguishes more clearly conditions in a free country from those in a country under arbitrary government than the observance in the former of the great principles known as the Rule of Law.

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.