Friedrich Hayek - Individual Quotes

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'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

Friedrich Hayek
I believe that the main lesson which our generation has learnt is that we must find a new limit for the activities of government, a limit which leaves ample scope for sensible experimentation but which secures the freedom of the individual as the mainspring of all social and political activity. The whole purpose of these lectures has been to suggest that we can find such a limit if we are willing to revive and develop the ancient ideal of the Rule of Law.

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
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
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
At a time when most movements that are thought to be progressive advocate further encroachments on individual liberty, those who cherish freedom are likely to expend their energies in opposition. In this they find themselves much of the time on the same side as those who habitually resist change.

Friedrich Hayek
A policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy.

Friedrich Hayek
Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarianism which horrify us follow of necessity

Friedrich Hayek
The conception that government should be guided by majority opinion makes sense only if that opinion is independent of government. The ideal of democracy rests on the belief that the view which will direct government emerges from an independent and spontaneous process. It requires, therefore, the existence of a large sphere independent of majority control in which the opinions of the individuals are formed.

Friedrich Hayek
Where effective competition can be created, it is a better way of guiding individual efforts than any other... regards competition as superior not only because it is in most circumstances the most efficient method known but even more because it is the only method by which our activities can be adjusted to each other without coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority.

Friedrich Hayek
[Apartheid law in South Africa] appears to be a clear and even extreme instance of that discrimination between different individuals which seems to me to be incompatible with the reign of liberty. The essence of what I said [in The Constitution of Liberty] was really the fact that the laws under which government can use coercion are equal for all responsible adult members of that society. Any kind of discrimination — be it on grounds of religion, political opinion, race, or whatever it is — seems to be incompatible with the idea of freedom under the law. Experience has shown that separate never is equal and cannot be equal.

Friedrich Hayek
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 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
We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.

Friedrich Hayek
The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess.
This does not matter in the natural sciences. Here the influence exercised by an individual is chiefly an influence on his fellow experts; and they will soon cut him down to size if he exceeds his competence.
But the influence of the economist that mainly matters is an influence over laymen: politicians, journalists, civil servants and the public generally.
There is no reason why a man who has made a distinctive contribution to economic science should be omnicompetent on all problems of society — as the press tends to treat him till in the end he may himself be persuaded to believe.

Friedrich Hayek
All economic activity is carried out through time. Every individual economic process occupies a certain time, and all linkages between economic processes necessarily involve longer or shorter periods of time.

Friedrich Hayek
The more civilized we become, the more relatively ignorant must each individual be of the facts on which the working of his civilization depends.

Friedrich Hayek
Civilization enables us constantly to profit from knowledge which we individually do not possess and because each individual's use of his particular knowledge may serve to assist others unknown to him in achieving their ends that men as members of civilized society can pursue their individual ends so much more successfully than they could alone.

Friedrich Hayek
It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.

Friedrich Hayek
A limited democracy might indeed be the best protector of individual liberty and be better than any other form of limited government, but an unlimited democracy is probably worse than any other form of unlimited government, because its government loses the power even to do what it thinks right if any group on which its majority depends thinks otherwise. If Mrs. Thatcher said that free choice is to be exercised more in the market place than in the ballot box, she has merely uttered the truism that the first is indispensable for individual freedom, while the second is not: free choice can at least exist under a dictatorship that can limit itself but not under the government of an unlimited democracy which cannot.

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
All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest.

Friedrich Hayek
I have certainly never contended that generally authoritarian governments are more likely to secure individual liberty than democratic ones, but rather the contrary. This does not mean, however, that in some historical circumstances personal liberty may not have been better protected under an authoritarian than democratic government. (...) More recently I have not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende. Nor have I heard any sensible person claim that in the principalities of Monaco or Lichtenstein, which I am told are not precisely democratic, personal liberty is smaller than anywhere else!

Friedrich Hayek
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 Hayek
The more the state "plans" the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.

Friedrich Hayek
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 Hayek
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this miracle of social justice.

Friedrich Hayek
It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only those individuals know.

Friedrich Hayek
There is no salvation for Britain unless the special privileges granted to the trade unions in 1906 are revoked. the average level of real wages of British workers would undoubtedly be higher, and their chances of finding employment better, if the wages of different occupations were again determined by the market and all limitations on the work an individual is allowed to do were removed.

Friedrich Hayek
A society that does not recognize that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom.

Friedrich Hayek