Friedrich August von Hayek quotes
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“'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.”
-- Friedrich August von HayekSource : "Law, Legislation and Liberty". Book by Friedrich Hayek. Volume 3: "The Political Order of a Free People". Chapter 17: "A Model Constitution", 1973.
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“It is only because the majority opinion will always be opposed by some that our knowledge and understanding progress... it is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.”
-- Friedrich August von Hayek -
“A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.”
-- Friedrich August von Hayek -
“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.”
-- Friedrich August von HayekSource : "The Constitution of Liberty". Book by Friedrich Hayek. Part II: "Freedom and the Law". Chapter 9: "Coercion and the State", 1960.
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“What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that nobody has complete power over us, that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves.”
-- Friedrich August von HayekSource : "The Road to Serfdom". Book by Friedrich Hayek, Ch. 7 : Economic Control and Totalitarianism, 1940 - 1943.
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“We must raise and train an army of fighters for freedom.”
-- Friedrich August von Hayek -
“Money is one of the greatest instruments of freedom ever invented by man. It is money which in existing society opens an astounding range of choice to the poor man, a range greater than that which not many generations ago was open to the wealthy”
-- Friedrich August von Hayek -
“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.”
-- Friedrich August von Hayek -
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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 -
“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 -
“Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom.”
-- Friedrich August von Hayek -
“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.”
-- Friedrich August von HayekSource : "New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas". Book by Friedrich Hayek. Part 2: "Politics". Chapter 8: "Economic Freedom and Representative Government", pp. 110-111, 1978.
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“Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality - an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order.”
-- Friedrich August von Hayek -
“The mind cannot foresee its own advance.”
-- Friedrich August von Hayek -
“The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.”
-- Friedrich August von Hayek -
“There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.”
-- Friedrich August von Hayek -
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“To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything.”
-- Friedrich August von Hayek -
“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.”
-- Friedrich August von Hayek -
“Each member of society can have only a small fraction of the knowledge possessed by all, and...each is therefore ignorant of most of the facts on which the working of society rests...civilization rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge which we do not possess. And one of the ways in which civilization helps us to overcome that limitation on the extent of individual knowledge is by conquering intelligence, not by the acquisition of more knowledge, but by the utilization of knowledge which is and which remains widely dispersed among individuals.”
-- Friedrich August von Hayek -
“The problems raised by a conscious direction of economic affairs on a national scale inevitably assume even greater dimensions when the same is attempted internationally. The conflict between planning and freedom cannot but become more serious as the similarity of standards and values among those submitted to a unitary plan diminishes.”
-- Friedrich August von Hayek -
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“It is also true that the less possible it becomes for a man to acquire a new fortune, the more must the existing fortunes appear as privileges for which there is no justification. Policy is then certain to aim at taking these fortunes out of private hands, either by the slow process of heavy taxation of inheritance or by the quicker one of outright confiscation. A system based on private property and control of the means of production presupposes that such property and control can be acquired by any successful man.”
-- Friedrich August von Hayek -
“Unlike the rationalism of the French Revolution, true liberalism has no quarrel with religion, and I can only deplore the militant and essentially illiberal antireligionism which animated so much of nineteenth-century Continental liberalism. ... What distinguishes the liberal from the conservative here is that, however profound his own spiritual beliefs, he will never regard himself as entitled to impose them on others and that for him the spiritual and the temporal are different sphere which ought not to be confused.”
-- Friedrich August von Hayek -
“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.”
-- Friedrich August von Hayek -
“We must not forget that … monetary policy all over the world has followed the advice of the stabilizers. It is high time that their influence, which has already done harm enough, should be overthrown.”
-- Friedrich August von Hayek -
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“When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.”
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
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