Top 100 Friedrich August Von Hayek Quotes
#2. Socialism is simply a re-assertion of that tribal ethics whose gradual weakening had made an approach to the Great Society possible.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#4. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#5. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#6. [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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#7. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#8. Hayek was making us think of the productive process as a process in time, inputs coming before outputs.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#9. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#10. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#11. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#13. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#14. The idea of social justice is that the state should treat different people unequally in order to make them equal
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#15. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#16. What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#17. 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
#18. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#19. We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#20. 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?
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#21. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#22. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#23. Liberty is an opportunity for doing good, but this is only so when it is also an opportunity for doing wrong.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#24. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#25. To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#26. There may be few instances in which the superstition that only measurable magnitudes can be important has done positive harm in the economic field: but the present inflation and employment problems are a very serious one.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#29. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#30. You can have economic freedom without political freedom, but you cannot have political freedom without economic freedom.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#31. 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
#33. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#36. 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
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#37. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#39. 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
#41. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#42. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#43. Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#44. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#45. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#46. To discover the meaning of what is called "social justice" has been one of my chief preoccupations for more than 10 years. I have failed in this endeavour or rather, have reached the conclusion that, with reference to society of free men, the phrase has no meaning whatever.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#47. The attitude of the liberal towards society is like that of the gardener who tends a plant and, in order to create the conditions most favorable to its growth, must know as much as possible about its structure and the way it functions.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#48. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#50. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#51. 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?
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#53. 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
#54. There is, in a competitive society, nobody who can exercise even a fraction of the power which a socialist planning board would possess.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#57. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#59. The chief difference [between totalitarian and free countries] is that only the totalitarians appear clearly to know how they want to achieve that result, while the free world has only its past achievements to show, being by its very nature unable to offer any detailed "plan" for further growth.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#60. I have arrived at the conviction that the neglect by economists to discuss seriously what is really the crucial problem of our time is due to a certain timidity about soiling their hands by going from purely scientific questions into value questions.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#61. Nobody with open eyes can any longer doubt that the danger to personal freedom comes chiefly from the left.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#62. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#64. I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#65. It is when it is contended that "in a democracy right is what the majority makes it to be" that democracy degenerates into demagoguery.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#72. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#73. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#74. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#75. It is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the intellectual that he judges new ideas not by their specific merits but by the readiness with which they fit into his general conceptions, into the picture of the world which he regards as modern or advanced.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#76. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#77. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#78. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#79. [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
#80. The history of government management of money has, except for a few short happy periods, been one of incessant fraud and deception.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#81. The Germans would appear as the disturbers of peace, as they already do to some people, merely because they were the first to take the path along which all the others were ultimately to follow.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#82. At a time when most movements that are thought to be progressive advocate further encroachments on individual liberty, those who cherish freedom are likely to expend their energies in opposition. In this they find themselves much of the time on the same side as those who habitually resist change.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#83. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#84. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#85. If we can reduce the risk of friction likely to lead to war, this is probably all we can reasonably hope to achieve.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#86. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#87. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#88. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#89. Once wide coercive powers are given to governmental agencies for particular purposes, such powers cannot be effectively controlled by democratic assemblies.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#90. Never will man penetrate deeper into error than when he is continuing on a road which has led him to great success
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#91. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#92. 'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#94. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#95. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#96. If the human intellect is allowed to impose a preconceived pattern on society, if our powers of reasoning are allowed to lay claim to a monopoly of creative effort ... then we must not be surprised if society, as such, ceases to function as a creative force.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#97. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#100. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
