Friedrich August Von Hayek Quotes
“Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.”
“If socialists understood economics, they wouldn’t be socialist.”
“The idea of social justice is that the state should treat different people
unequally in order to make them equal.”
“You can have economic freedom without political freedom, but you cannot have
political freedom without economic freedom.”
“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.”
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really
know about what they imagine they can design.”
“Social justice rests on the hate towards those that enjoy a comfortable
position, namely, upon envy.”
“In government, the scum rises to the top.”
“To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in
everything.”
“Conservatism is only as good as what it conserves.”
“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?”
“A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with
totalitarian powers.”
“Through the inevitable mismanagement of resources and goods at the disposal of
the state, all forms of collectivism lead eventually to tyranny.”
“There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and
attempting to make them equal.”
“Any man who is only an economist is unlikely to be a good one.”
“Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its
advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong.”
“Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be
beneficial is not freedom.”
“The more the state “plans” the more difficult planning becomes for the
individual.”
“Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement.”
“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.”
“Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion.”
“When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably
destroy itself.”
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“The history of government management of money has, except for a few short
happy periods, been one of incessant fraud and deception.”
“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.”
“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.”
“To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure
the evil by the very means which brought it about.”
“Should our moral beliefs really prove to be dependent on factual assumptions
shown to be incorrect, it would be hardly moral to defend them by refusing to acknowledge
the facts.”
“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.”
“If freedom is to flourish the philosophic foundations of a free society must
be kept a living intellectual issue and its implementation a task which
challenges the ingenuity and imagination of the liveliest minds.”
“It is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also
possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. Personally
I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism.”
“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.”
“The chief evil is unlimited government, and nobody is qualified to wield
unlimited power.”
“Planning leads to dictatorship because dictatorship is the most effective
instrument of coercion and the enforcement of ideals and, as such, essential if
central planning on a large scale is to be possible.”
“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.”
“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.”
“There is, in a competitive society, nobody who can exercise even a fraction of
the power which a socialist planning board would possess.”
“The mischievous idea that all public needs should be satisfied by compulsory
organization and that all the means that individuals are willing to devote to
pubic purposes should be under the control of government, is wholly alien to
the basic principles of a free society.”
“This is the constitutional limitation of man’s knowledge and interests, the
fact that he cannot know more than a tiny part of the whole of society and that
therefore all that can enter into his motives are the immediate effects which
his actions will have in the sphere he knows.”
“The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded
as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the
supreme rule.”
“Freedom can be preserved only if it is treated as a supreme principle which
must not be sacrificed for particular advantages.”
“I was quite depressed two weeks ago when I spent an afternoon at Brentano’s
Bookshop in New York and was looking at the kind of books most people read.
Once you see that you lose all hope.”
“Least of all shall we preserve democracy or foster its growth if all the power
and most of the important decisions rest with an organization far too big for
the common man to survey or comprehend.”
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“Competition is like experimentation in science, a discovery process, and it
must rely on the self interest of producers, it must allow them to use their
knowledge for their purposes, because nobody else possesses the information.”
“Once politics become a tug-of-war for shares in the income pie, decent
government is impossible.”
“We must raise and train an army of fighters for freedom.”
“Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking
liberalism.”
“Without a theory the facts are silent.”
“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.”
“Capitalism created the possibility of employment.”
“The idea that human kind can shape the world according to wish is what I call
the fatal conceit.”
“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.”
“The mind cannot foresee its own advance.”
“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.”
“If we can reduce the risk of friction likely to lead to war, this is probably
all we can reasonably hope to achieve.”
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“Nobody with open eyes can any longer doubt that the danger to personal freedom
comes chiefly from the left.”
“I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize
in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it.”
“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.”
“I regard it in fact as the great advantage of the mathematical technique that
it allows us to describe, by means of algebraic equations, the general
character of a pattern even where we are ignorant of the numerical values which
will determine its particular manifestation.”
“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.”
“We know, in other words, the general conditions in which what we call,
somewhat misleadingly, an equilibrium will establish itself: but we never know
what the particular prices or wages are which would exist if the market were to
bring about such an equilibrium.”
“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.”
“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.”
“If I am not mistaken, psychology, psychiatry and some branches of sociology,
not to speak about the so-called philosophy of history, are even more affected
by what I have called the scientistic prejudice, and by specious claims of what
science can achieve.”
“Never will man penetrate deeper into error than when he is continuing on a
road which has led him to great success.”
“It would clearly not be an improvement to build all houses exactly alike in
order to create a perfect market for houses, and the same is true of most other
fields where differences between the individual products prevent competition
from ever being perfect.”
“The greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed
and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert
administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good.”
“We shall all be the gainers if we can create a world fit for small states to
live in.”
“Our moral traditions developed concurrently with our reason, not as its
product.”
“It is neither necessary nor desirable that national boundaries should mark
sharp differences in standards of living, that membership of a national group
should entitle to a share in a cake altogether different from that in which
members of other groups share.”
“Socialism is simply a re-assertion of that tribal ethics whose gradual weakening
had made an approach to the Great Society possible.”
“Hayek was making us think of the productive process as a process in time,
inputs coming before outputs.”
“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.”
“Without the rich – without those who accumulated capital – those poor who
could exist at all would be very much poorer indeed, scratching a livelihood
from marginal lands on which every drought would kill most of the children they
would be trying to raise.”
“That there is little hope of international order or lasting peace so long as
every country is free to employ whatever measures it thinks desirable in its
own immediate interest, however damaging they may be to others, needs little
emphasis now.”
“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.”
Quotes From Friedrich A. Hayek
“We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very
foolish.”
“We did not realise how fragile our civilisation was.”
“Economic transactions between national bodies who are at the same time the
supreme judges of their own behavior, who bow to no superior law, and whose
representatives cannot be bound by any considerations but the immediate
interest of their respective nations, must end in clashes of power.”
“Perhaps even more than elsewhere current notions of what is desirable and
practicable are here still of a kind which may well produce the opposite of
what they promise.”
“We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual
adventure, a deed of courage.”
“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.”
“The progress of the natural sciences in modern times has of course so much
exceeded all expectations that any suggestion that there may be some limits to
it is bound to arouse suspicion.”
“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.”
“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.”
“What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would
be able to do if only he were free.”
“Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement. It is
by no means an obvious remedy for the obvious evil which the interests of that
class will necessarily demand. It is a construction of theorists.”
“We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is
incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.”
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“Whenever it is necessary that one of several conflicting opinions should
prevail and when one would have to be made to prevail by force if need be, it
is less wasteful to determine which has the stronger support by counting
numbers than by fighting.”
“Is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that, in our endeavour consciously
to shape our future in accordance with high ideals, we should in fact
unwittingly produce the very opposite of what we have been striving for?”
“Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and
other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of
the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are
necessarily limited and may not include the important ones.”
“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.”
“In no other field has the world yet paid so dearly for the abandonment of
nineteenth-century liberalism as in the field where the retreat began: in
international relations. Yet only a small part of the lesson which experience
ought to have taught us has been learned.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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?”
“Once wide coercive powers are given to governmental agencies for particular
purposes, such powers cannot be effectively controlled by democratic
assemblies.”
“If most people are not willing to see the difficulty, this is mainly because,
consciously or unconsciously, they assume that it will be they who will settle
these questions for the others, and because they are convinced of their own
capacity to do this.”
“It 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.”
“Many of the greatest things man has achieved are not the result of consciously
directed thought, and still less the product of a deliberately coordinated
effort of many individuals, but of a process in which the individual plays a
part which he can never fully understand.”
“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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