Friedrich Hayek Quotes

188 Sourced Quotes

Never will man penetrate deeper into error than when he is continuing on a road which has led him to great success

Friedrich Hayek
From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time

Friedrich Hayek
Freedom can be preserved only if it is treated as a supreme principle which must not be sacrificed for particular advantages.

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

Friedrich Hayek
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 Hayek
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 Hayek
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
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 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
I feared that such a prize, as I believe is true of the activities of some of the great scientific foundations, would tend to accentuate the swings of scientific fashion. This apprehension the selection committee has brilliantly refuted by awarding the prize to one whose views are as unfashionable as mine are.

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
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 did say in print, in February, 1929 that there was no hope for economic recovery in Europe before American interest rates came down. That wouldn't be until the American boom collapsed — which was likely to happen within the next few months. And this did, in fact, happen in October 1929.
What made me expect this, of course, was one of my main theoretical beliefs — that an inflationary boom cannot be maintained indefinitely. I was sure that a very unstable situation was created by the artificial prolongation of the boom in 1927, when the Federal Reserve tried to stave off a collapse by credit expansion.

Friedrich Hayek
No human mind can comprehend all the knowledge which guides the actions of society.

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 seems to me more and more that the immense efforts which during the great popularity of macroeconomics over the last thirty or forty years have been devoted to it, were largely misspent, and that if we want to be useful in the future we shall have to be content to improve and spread the admittedly limited insights which microeconomics conveys. I believe it is only microeconomics which enables us to understand the crucial functions of the market process: that it enables us to make effective use of information about thousands of facts of which nobody can have full knowledge.

Friedrich Hayek
The mechanism by which the interaction of democratic decisions and their implementation by the experts often produces results which nobody has desired is a subject which would deserve much more careful attention than it usually receives.

Friedrich Hayek
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 Hayek
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 Hayek