Top 100 Friedrich Von Hayek Quotes
#1. No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek.
Herbert Simon
#2. The free-market economist Friedrich von Hayek once said that "without a theory, the facts are silent." But for Greenspan, with his theory, the facts became invisible.
Anonymous
#3. The publication of Friedrich A. von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom in 1944 is rightly seen as the first shot in the intellectual battle that was to turn the tide in favor of conservatism i.e. non-statist liberalism .
E. J. Dionne
#4. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#5. Socialism constitutes a threat to the present and future welfare of the human race, in the sense that neither socialism nor any other known substitute for the market order could sustain the current population of the world.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#6. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#7. Through the inevitable mismanagement of resources and goods at the disposal of the state, all forms of collectivism lead eventually to tyranny.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#9. 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
#10. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#15. If you look underneath the surface of the Tea Party movement, on the other hand, you will find that it is not sophisticated. It's not like these people have read the economist Friedrich August von Hayek.
Karl Rove
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#25. 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?
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#26. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#30. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#31. Social justice rests on the hate towards those that enjoy a comfortable position, namely, upon envy.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#40. 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
#41. We have indeed at the moment little cause for pride: as a profession we have made a mess of things.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#42. Nobody with open eyes can any longer doubt that the danger to personal freedom comes chiefly from the left.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#43. 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
#44. 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
#46. The [classical] liberal, of course, does not deny that there are some superior people
he is not an egalitarian
but he denies that anyone has authority to decide who these superior people are.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#47. 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
#49. The social sciences, like much of biology but unlike most fields of the physical sciences, have to deal with structures of essential complexity, i.e. with structures whose characteristic properties can be exhibited only by models made up of relatively large numbers of variables.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. The idea of social justice is that the state should treat different people unequally in order to make them equal
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#60. 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
#61. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Hayek was making us think of the productive process as a process in time, inputs coming before outputs.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#67. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#68. 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
#69. [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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#73. 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
#75. Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#76. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#77. Liberty'.that condition of man in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as possible in society
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#78. 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
#79. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#80. 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.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#81. 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
#84. 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
#86. 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
#87. You can have economic freedom without political freedom, but you cannot have political freedom without economic freedom.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#88. 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
#92. 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 Hayek
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. Few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and naziism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
