Friedrich August Von Hayek Quotes

There is only one '' principle that can preserve a free society: namely, the strict prevention of all coercion except in the enforcement of general abstract rules equally applicable to all.

It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.

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.

Once politics become a tug-of-war for shares in the income pie, decent government is impossible.

Socialism is simply a re-assertion of that tribal ethics whose gradual weakening had made an approach to the Great Society possible.

The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess.

The history of government management of money has, except for a few short happy periods, been one of incessant fraud and deception.

Capitalism created the possibility of employment.

It is not the source but the limitation of power which prevents it from being arbitrary.

The guiding principle that a policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy remains as true today as it was in the nineteenth century.

Once wide coercive powers are given to governmental agencies for particular purposes, such powers cannot be effectively controlled by democratic assemblies.

Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement.

Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong.

Why should we, however, in economics, have to plead ignorance of the sort of facts on which, in the case of a physical theory, a scientist would certainly be expected to give precise information?

You can have economic freedom without political freedom, but you cannot have political freedom without economic freedom.

Nowhere has democracy ever worked well without a great measure of local self-government, providing a school of political training for the people at large as much as for their future leaders.

The mind cannot foresee its own advance.

The credit which the apparent conformity with recognized scientific standards can gain for seemingly simple but false theories may, as the present instance shows, have grave consequences.

Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom.

... I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much undetermined and unpredictable, to a pretense of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.

When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.

We must shed the illusion that we can deliberately 'create the future of mankind'

The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.

To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about.

There is, in a competitive society, nobody who can exercise even a fraction of the power which a socialist planning board would possess.

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.

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.

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

Never will man penetrate deeper into error than when he is continuing on a road which has led him to great success

If democracy is a means rather than an end, its limits must be determined in the light of the purpose we want it to serve.

Without a theory the facts are silent.

The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before the law.

The freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use.

Liberty'''.that condition of man in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as possible in society

What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.

We shall all be the gainers if we can create a world fit for small states to live in.

We know: of course, with regard to the market and similar social structures, a great many facts which we cannot measure and on which indeed we have only some very imprecise and general information.

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.

The more I learn about the evolution of ideas, the more I have become aware that I am simply an unrepentant Old Whig-with the stress on the "old.

[The] impersonal process of the market ... can be neither just nor unjust, because the results are not intended or foreseen.

From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.

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.

One need not be a prophet to be aware of impending dangers. An accidental combination of experience and interest will often reveal events to one man under aspects which few yet see.

... that order generated without design can far outstrip plans men consciously contrive

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.

If we can reduce the risk of friction likely to lead to war, this is probably all we can reasonably hope to achieve.

Hayek was making us think of the productive process as a process in time, inputs coming before outputs.

We did not realise how fragile our civilisation was.

Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism.

We certainly do not regard it as right that the citizens of a large country should dominate those of a small adjoining country merely because they are more numerous.