Friedrich Hayek Quotes

188 Sourced Quotes

Freedom necessarily means that many things will be done which we do not like.

Friedrich Hayek
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 Hayek
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 Hayek
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 Hayek
Even when men approve of the same arrangements, it must be asked whether they approve of them because they exist or because they are desirable in themselves. The common resistance to the collectivist tide should not be allowed to obscure the fact that the belief in integral freedom is based on an essentially forward-looking attitude and not on any nostalgic longing for the past or a romantic admiration for what has been.

Friedrich Hayek
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 Hayek
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 Hayek
That order generated without design can far outstrip plans men consciously contrive

Friedrich Hayek
We must shed the illusion that we can deliberately "create the future of mankind." This is the final conclusion of the forty years which I have now devoted to the study of these problems

Friedrich Hayek
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 Hayek
The conservative feels safe and content only if he is assured that some higher wisdom watches and supervises change, only if he knows that some authority is charged with keeping the change "orderly.

Friedrich Hayek
Conservatives are inclined to use the powers of government to prevent change or to limit its rate to whatever appeals to the more timid mind. In looking forward, they lack the faith in the spontaneous forces of adjustment which makes the liberal accept changes without apprehension, even though he does not know how the necessary adaptations will be brought about.

Friedrich Hayek
Nothing distinguishes more clearly conditions in a free country from those in a country under arbitrary government than the observance in the former of the great principles known as the Rule of Law.

Friedrich Hayek
When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.

Friedrich Hayek
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 Hayek
It seems to be almost a law of human nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative program - on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off - than on any positive task.

Friedrich Hayek
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 Hayek
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 Hayek
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 Hayek
To live and work successfully with others requires more than faithfulness to one's concrete aims. It requires an intellectual commitment to a type of order in which, even on issues which to one are fundamental, others are allowed to pursue different ends. It is for this reason that to the liberal neither moral nor religious ideals are proper objects of coercion, while both conservatives and socialists recognize no such limits.

Friedrich Hayek
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 Hayek
Unlike proportionality, progression provides no principle which tells us what the relative burden of different persons ought to be the argument based on the presumed justice of progression provides no limitation, as has often been admitted by its supporters, before all incomes above a certain figure are confiscated, and those below left untaxed.

Friedrich Hayek
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 Hayek
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 Hayek
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 Hayek
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 Hayek
We have indeed at the moment little cause for pride: as a profession we have made a mess of things.

Friedrich Hayek
What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that nobody has complete power over us, that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves.

Friedrich Hayek
It is not the source but the limitation of power which prevents it from being
arbitrary.

Friedrich Hayek
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 Hayek