Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes - Page 8

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• It is only because the majority opinion will always be opposed by some that our knowledge and understanding progress. In the process by which opinion is formed, it is very probable that, 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. It is because we do not yet know which of the many competing new opinions will prove itself the best that we wait until it has gained sufficient support.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Wisdom, Views, Waiting

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

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• The mind cannot foresee its own advance.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Mind

  "The Constitution of Liberty". Book by Friedrich Hayek, Chap. 2 : The Creative Power of a Free Civilization, 1960.

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• I am still puzzled why those in the United States who truly believe in liberty should not only have allowed the left to appropriate this almost indispensable term but should even have assisted by beginning to use it themselves as a term of opprobrium. This seems to be particularly regrettable because of the consequent tendency of many true liberals to describe themselves as conservatives.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Believe, Liberty, United States

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• 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

  Country, Thinking, Order

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

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• ...the case for individual freedom rests largely on the recognition of the inevitable and universal ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievements of our ends and welfare depend.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Ignorance, Achievement, Liberty

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• The freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Men, Important, Majority

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• The effect of the people's agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to take a journey together without agreeing where they want to go; with the result that they may all have to make a journey which most of them do not want at all.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Journey, People, Together

  "The Road to Serfdom". Book by Friedrich Hayek, Ch. 5 : Planning and Democracy, 1940 - 1943.

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• Unlike the rationalism of the French Revolution, true liberalism has no quarrel with religion, and I can only deplore the militant and essentially illiberal antireligionism which animated so much of nineteenth-century Continental liberalism. ... What distinguishes the liberal from the conservative here is that, however profound his own spiritual beliefs, he will never regard himself as entitled to impose them on others and that for him the spiritual and the temporal are different sphere which ought not to be confused.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Spiritual, Respect, Confused

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• 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 August von Hayek

  Men, Events, Needs

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• The importance of our being free to do a particular thing has nothing to do with the question of whether we or the majority are ever likely to make use of that particular possibility. To grant no more freedom than all can exercise would be to misconceive its function completely. The freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Freedom, Exercise, Men

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• 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

  People, Path, Firsts

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

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• 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

  War, Risk, Achieve

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

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• If the resources of different nations are treated as exclusive properties of these nations as wholes, if international economic relations, instead of being relations between individuals, become increasingly relations between whole nations organized as trading bodies, they inevitably become the source of friction and envy between whole nations.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Envy, Different, Body

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

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• The task of the political philosopher can only be to influence public opinion, not to organize people for action. He will do so effectively only if he is not concerned with what is now politically possible but consistently defends the "general principles which are always the same." In this sense I doubt whether there can be such a thing as a conservative political philosophy. Conservatism may often be a useful practical maxim, but it does not give us any guiding principles which can influence long-range developments.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Philosophy, Guiding Principles, Often Is

  "The Constitution of Liberty". Book by Friedrich Hayek, Postscript: Why I Am Not a Conservative, 1960.

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• 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

  Law, Judging, Bows

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

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• There is nothing in the basic principles of liberalism to make it a stationary creed; there are no hard-and-fast rules fixed once and for all. ... Probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez faire.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Principles, Done, Thumbs

  "The Road to Serfdom". Book by Friedrich Hayek, Ch. 1 : The Abandoned Road, 1940 - 1943.

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• 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

  Would Be, Moral Beliefs, Facts

  "The Constitution of Liberty". Book by Friedrich Hayek, Postscript: Why I Am Not a Conservative, 1960.

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• It is rarely remembered now that socialism in its beginnings was frankly authoritarian. It began quite openly as a reaction against the liberalism of the French Revolution. The French writers who laid its foundation had no doubt that their ideas could be put into practice only by a strong dictatorial government. The first of modern planners, Saint-Simon, predicted that those who did not obey his proposed planning boards would be 'treated as cattle'.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Strong, Government, Practice

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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.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Fighting, Numbers, Support

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

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• I am convinced that if the market system were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aims, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  People, Design, Decision

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• 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

  Data, Discipline, Important

  "New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas". Book by Friedrich Hayek. Part I: "Philosophy ". Chapter 2: "The Pretence of Knowledge", p. 24, 1978.

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• Whatever men live for, today most live only because of the market order.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Men, Order, Live For Today

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• 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

  Men, Justice, Liberty

  "The Constitution of Liberty". Book by Friedrich Hayek, p. 99, 1960.

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• Our hopes of avoiding the fate which threatens must...[be to make]adjustments that will be needed if we are to recover and surpass our former standards...and only if every one of us is ready to individually obey the necessities of readjustment shall we be able to get through a difficult period as free men who can choose their own way of life. Let a uniform minimum be secured to everybody by all means; but let us admit at the same time that with this assurance of a basic minimum all claims for a privileged security for particular classes must lapse.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Mean, Fate, Men

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• 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

  Society, Liberty, Would Be

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

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