Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes - Page 6

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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

  Understanding, Progress, Acting

  "The Constitution of Liberty". Book by Friedrich Hayek, Chap. 7 : Majority Rules, 1960.

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• The guiding principle that a policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy remains as true today as it was in the nineteenth century.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Progressive, Individual, Road To Serfdom

  "The Road to Serfdom". Book by Friedrich Hayek. Chapter 16: "Conclusion", 1944.

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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

  Determination, Mean, Equality

  "The Road to Serfdom" by Friedrich August von Hayek, (Ch. 11), 1944.

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• 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

  Responsibility, Men, Order

  "The Constitution of Liberty". Book by Friedrich Hayek, Chap. 14 : The Safeguards of Individual Liberty, 1960.

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• 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. That seems to be hopeless; once you see that you lose all hope.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  New York, Book, Two

  "The Road from Serfdom". Interview with Thomas Winslow Hazlett, reason.com. July 1992.

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• It may be that a free society... carries in itself the forces of its own destruction, that once freedom has been achieved it is taken for granted and ceases to be valued, and that the free growth of ideas which is the essence of a free society will bring about the destruction of the foundations on which it depends.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Taken, Essence, Ideas

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• 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

  Attitude, Order, Growth

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• 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

  Faith, Thinking, Government

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• 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

  Done, Planning, Economic

  "The Use of Knowledge in Society" by Friedrich Hayek, American Economic Review, September 1945.

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• 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

  Health, Men, Civilization

  "The Counter-Revolution of Science". Book by Friedrich Hayek, "Purposive" Social Formations (ch. 8, page 84), 1952.

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• [The] impersonal process of the market ... can be neither just nor unjust, because the results are not intended or foreseen.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Justice, Unjust, Process

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• We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Adventure, Dark, Issues

  "Hayek on a Society Based on Freedom" by Scott Horton, harpers.org. August 08, 2007.

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• Independence of mind or strength of character is rarely found among those who cannot be confident that they will make their way by their own effort.... Indeed, when security is understood in too absolute a sense, the general striving for it, far from increasing the chances of freedom, becomes the greatest threat to it.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Character, Effort, Mind

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• To undertake the direction of the economic life of people with widely divergent ideals and values is to assume responsibilities which commit one to the use of force; it is to assume a position where the best intentions cannot prevent one from being forced to act in a way which to some of those affected must appear highly immoral. This is true even if we assume the dominant power to be as idealistic and unselfish as we can possibly conceive. But how small is the likelihood that it will be unselfish, and how great are the temptations!

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Responsibility, People, Temptation

  "The Road to Serfdom". Book by Friedrich Hayek, Ch. 15 : The Prospects of International Order, 1940 - 1943.

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• The economic freedom which is the prerequisite of any other freedom cannot be the freedom from economic care which the socialist promise us, and which can be obtained only by relieving the individual at the same time of the necessity and of the power of choice: it must be the freedom of economic activity which, with the right of choice, inevitably also carries the risk and the responsibility of that right

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Responsibility, Choices, Risk

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• 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

  Ethics, Socialism, Made

  "Law, Legislation and Liberty". Book by Friedrich Hayek, Ch. 11 : The Discipline of Abstract Rules and the Emotions of the Tribal Society, 1973.

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

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Steps, Idealist, Road To Serfdom

  "The Road to Serfdom". Book by Friedrich Hayek. Chapter 4: "The 'Inevitability' of Planning", 1944.

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• Our submission to general principles is necessary because we cannot be guided in our practical action by full knowledge and evaluation of the consequences. So long as men are not omniscient, the only way in which freedom can be given to the individual is by such general rules to delimit the sphere in which the decision is his. There can be no freedom if the government is not limited to particular kinds of action but can use its powers in any ways which serve particular ends.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Freedom, Men, Long

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• There can be little doubt that man owes some of his greatest successes in the past to the fact that he has not been able to control social life. His continued advance may well depend on his deliberately refraining from exercising controls which are now in his power.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Exercise, Men, Past

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• 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

  Running, Long, People

  "Individualism and Economic Order". Book by Friedrich Hayek, 'Free' Enterprise and Competitive Order, April 1947.

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• We must show that liberty is not merely one particular value but that it is the source and condition of most moral values. What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free. We can therefore not fully appreciate the value of freedom until we know how a society of free men as a whole differs from one in which unfreedom prevails.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Men, Appreciate, Individuality

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• It is true that the virtues which are less esteemed and practiced now--independence, self-reliance, and the willingness to bear risks, the readiness to back one's own conviction against a majority, and the willingness to voluntary cooperation with one's neighbors--are essentially those on which the of an individualist society rests. Collectivism has nothing to put in their place, and in so far as it already has destroyed then it has left a void filled by nothing but the demand for obedience and the compulsion of the individual to what is collectively decided to be good.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Self, Risk, Independence

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• In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Mean, Doe, Minorities

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• Humiliating to human pride as it may be, we must recognize that the advance and even the preservation of civilization are dependent upon a maximum of opportunity for accidents to happen.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Pride, Opportunity, Civilization

  "The Constitution of Liberty". Book by Friedrich Hayek, 1960.

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• 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

  Proportion, Blight, Centralization

  "The Road to Serfdom". Book by Friedrich Hayek, Ch. 15 : The Prospects of International Order, 1940 - 1943.

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