Friedrich Hayek Quotes

#1. 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.

Friedrich Hayek

#2. To assume all the knowledge to be given to a single mind ... is to disregard everything that is important and significant in the real world.

Friedrich Hayek

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

Friedrich Hayek

#4. 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.

Friedrich Hayek

#5. Capitalism presumes that apart from our rational insight we possess a traditional endowment of morals, which has been tested by evolution but not designed by our intelligence.

Friedrich Hayek

#6. From the point of view of fundamental human liberties there is little to choose between communism, socialism, and national socialism. They all are examples of the collectivist or totalitarian state ...

Friedrich Hayek

#7. The views of intellectuals influence the politics of tomorrow ... What to the contemporary observer appears as the battle of conflicting interests has indeed often been described long before in a clash of ideas confined to narrow circles.

Friedrich Hayek

#8. 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 Hayek

#9. In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority.

Friedrich Hayek

#10. Man does not know most of the rules on which he acts; and even what we call his intelligence is largely a system of rules which operate on him but which he does not know.

Friedrich Hayek

#11. Civilization rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge which we do not possess.

Friedrich Hayek

#12. 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 Hayek

#13. To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm.

Friedrich Hayek

#14. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion.

Friedrich Hayek

#15. When security is understood in too absolute a sense, the general striving for it, far from increasing the chances of freedom, becomes the gravest
threat to it.

Friedrich Hayek

#16. There is no answer in the available literature to the question why a government monopoly of the provision of money is universally regarded as indispensable ... It has the defects of all monopolies.

Friedrich Hayek

#17. During war the market system is more or less abandoned, as many parts of the economy are placed under central control. Hayek's fear was that socialists would want to continue such

Friedrich Hayek

#18. Though freedom is not a state of nature but an artifact of civilization, it did not arise from design.

Friedrich Hayek

#19. To act on behalf of a group seems to free people of many of the moral restraints which control their behaviour as individuals within the group.

Friedrich Hayek

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

Friedrich Hayek

#21. Presupposes a much more complete agreement on the relative importance of the different ends than actually exists, and that, in consequence, in order to be able to plan, the planning authority must impose upon the people that detailed code of values which is lacking.

Friedrich Hayek

#22. The fact that German anti-Semitism and anticapitalism spring from the same root is of great importance for the understanding of what has happened there, but this is rarely grasped by foreign observers.

Friedrich Hayek

#23. If socialists understood economics they wouldn't be socialists.

Friedrich Hayek

#24. The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those which they, or at least the best among them, have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognised before.

Friedrich Hayek

#25. It is because every individual knows little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it.

Friedrich Hayek

#26. 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.

Friedrich Hayek

#27. In this sense socialism means the abolition of private enterprise, of private ownership of the means of production, and the creation of a system of "planned economy" in which the entrepreneur working for profit is replaced by a central planning body.

Friedrich Hayek

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

Friedrich Hayek

#29. But what socialists seriously contemplate the equal division of existing capital resources among the people of the world?

Friedrich Hayek

#30. While an equality of rights under a limited government is possible and an essential condition of individual freedom, a claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.

Friedrich Hayek

#31. Our faith in freedom does not rest on the foreseeable results in particular circumstances but on the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than for the bad.

Friedrich Hayek

#32. Although we had been warned by some of the greatest political thinkers of the nineteenth century, by Tocqueville and Lord Acton, that socialism means slavery, we have steadily moved in the direction of socialism.

Friedrich Hayek

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

Friedrich Hayek

#34. Unemployment or the loss of income which will always affect some in any society is certainly less degrading if it is the result of misfortune and not deliberately imposed by authority.

Friedrich Hayek

#35. Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions ... Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.

Friedrich Hayek

#36. The ultimate ends of the activities of reasonable beings are never economic. Money is one of the greatest instruments of freedom ever invented by man.

Friedrich Hayek

#37. Only if we understand why and how certain kinds of economic controls tend to paralyze the driving forces of a free society, and which kinds of measures are particularly dangerous in this respect, can we hope that social experimentation will not lead us into situations none of us want.

Friedrich Hayek

#38. The price system is a mechanism for coordinating knowledge; and

Friedrich Hayek