Top 70 Friedrich A. Hayek Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “To split or decentralize power is necessarily to reduce the absolute amount of power, and the competitive system is the only system designed to minimize by decentralization the power exercised by man over man.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

2. “There is no justification for the belief that, so long as power is conferred by democratic procedure, it cannot be arbitrary; the contrast suggested by this statement is altogether false: it is not the source but the limitation of power which prevents it from being arbitrary.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

3. “Hitler did not have to destroy democracy; he merely took advantage of the decay of democracy and at the critical moment obtained the support of many to whom, though they detested Hitler, he yet seemed the only man strong enough to get things done.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

4. “There is something seriously lacking in a society in which all the intellectual, moral, and artistic leaders belong to the employed class, especially if most of them are in the employment of the government. Yet we are moving everywhere toward such a position.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

5. “If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

6. “Unlike the rationalism of the French Revolution, true liberalism has no quarrel with religion.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

7. “Tradition is not something constant but the product of a process of selection guided not by reason but by success. It changes but can rarely be deliberately changed. Cultural selection is not a rational process; it is not guided by but it creates reason.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

8. “It should be noted, moreover, that monopoly is frequently the product of factors other than the lower costs of greater size. It is attained through collusive agreement and promoted by public policies. When these agreements are invalidated and when these policies are reversed, competitive conditions can be restored.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

9. “Individualism has a bad name today, and the term has come to be connected with egotism and selfishness.7 But the individualism of which we speak in contrast to socialism and all other forms of collectivism has no necessary connection with these.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

10. “Our faith in freedom does not rest on the foreseeable results in particular circumstances but on the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than for the bad.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

11. “Where the power which ought to check and control monopoly becomes interested in sheltering and defending its appointees, where for the government to remedy an abuse is to admit responsibility for it, and where criticism of the actions of monopoly means criticism of the government, there is little hope of monopoly becoming the servant of the community.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

12. “We have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past. Although we had been warned by some of the greatest political thinkers of the nineteenth century, by Tocqueville and Lord Acton, that socialism means slavery, we have steadily moved in the direction of socialism.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

13. “Tradition is not good simply because it is tradition. It is for what it has given us and only so long as an alternative does not prove by its effect that it is better.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

14. “Law in its ideal form might be described as a ‘once-and-for-all’ command that is directed to unknown people and that is abstracted from all particular circumstances of time and place and refers only to such conditions as may occur anywhere and at any time.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

15. “The dispute about socialism has thus become largely a dispute about means and not about ends – although the question whether the different ends of socialism can be simultaneously achieved is also involved.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

16. “What in effect unites the socialists of the Left and the Right is this common hostility to competition and their common desire to replace it by a directed economy. Though the terms “capitalism” and “socialism” are still generally used to describe the past and the future forms of society, they conceal rather than elucidate the nature of the transition through which we are passing.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

17. “I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much indetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

18. “It is necessary in the first instance that the parties in the market should be free to sell and buy at any price at which they can find a partner to the transaction and that anybody should be free to produce, sell, and buy anything that may be produced or sold at all. And it is essential that the entry into the different trades should be open to all on equal terms and that the law should not tolerate any attempts by individuals or groups to restrict this entry by open or concealed force.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

19. “It is now often said that democracy will not tolerate “capitalism.” If “capitalism” means here a competitive system based on free disposal over private property, it is far more important to realize that only within this system is democracy possible. When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

20. “At least insofar as the rules providing for coercion are not aimed at me personally but are so framed as to apply equally to all people in similar circumstances, they are no different from any of the natural obstacles that affect my plans.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

21. “If all had to wait for better things until they could be provided for all, that day would in many instances never come. Even the poorest today owe their relative material well-being to the results of past inequality.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

22. “To the accepted Christian tradition that man must be free to follow his conscience in moral matters if his actions are to be of any merit, the economists added the further argument that he should be free to make full use of his knowledge and skill, that he must be allowed to be guided by his concern for the particular things of which he knows and for which he cares, if he is to make as great a contribution to the common purposes of society as he is capable of making.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

23. “Is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that, in our endeavor 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 A. Hayek

24. “The functioning of a competition not only requires adequate organization of certain institutions like money, markets, and channels of information – some of which can never be adequately provided by private enterprise – but it depends, above all, on the existence of an appropriate legal system, a legal system designed both to preserve competition and to make it operate as beneficially as possible.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

25. “But scarcely less surprising to me was the enthusiastic welcome accorded to the book by many whom I never expected to read a volume of this type – and from many more of whom I still doubt whether in fact they ever read it.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

26. “The influence of these scientist-politicians was of late years not often on the side of liberty: the “intolerance of reason” so frequently conspicuous in the scientific specialist, the impatience with the ways of the ordinary man so characteristic of the expert, and the contempt for anything which was not consciously organized by superior minds according to a scientific blueprint were phenomena familiar in German public life for generations before they became of significance in England.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

27. “To appreciate what it meant to those who took part in it, we must measure it by the hopes and wishes men held when it began:.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

28. “Socialism was embraced by the greater part of the intelligentsia as the apparent heir of the liberal tradition: therefore it is not surprising that to them the idea of socialism’s leading to the opposite of liberty should appear inconceivable.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

29. “The way in which, in the end, with few exceptions, her scholars and scientists put themselves readily at the service of the new rulers is one of the most depressing and shameful spectacles in the whole history of the rise of National Socialism.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

30. “The four requirements just listed – that whatever is not scientifically proven, or is not fully understood, or lacks a fully specified purpose, or has some unknown effects, is unreasonable – are particularly well suited to constructivist rationalism and to socialist thought.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

31. “The more men know, the smaller the share of all that knowledge becomes that any one mind can absorb. The more civilized we become, the more relatively ignorant must each individual be of the facts on which the working of his civilization depends. The very division of knowledge increases the necessary ignorance of the individual of most of this knowledge.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

32. “We shall never prevent the abuse of power if we are not prepared to limit power in a way which occasionally may also prevent its use for desirable purposes.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

33. “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 A. Hayek

34. “Man is free if he needs to obey no person but solely the laws.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

35. “For most of us the time we spend at our work is a large part of our whole lives, and as our job usually also determines the place where and the people among whom we live, some freedom in choosing our work is, probably, even more important for our happiness than freedom to spend our income during the hours of leisure.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

36. “The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself. – Hilaire Belloc.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

37. “The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

38. “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 A. Hayek

39. “It is only because we have forgotten what unfreedom means that we often overlook the patent fact that in every real sense a badly paid unskilled worker in this country has more freedom to shape his life than many a small entrepreneur in Germany.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

40. “Democracy is essentially a means, a utilitarian device for safeguarding internal peace and individual freedom. As such it is by no means infallible or certain.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

41. “This development of a theory of liberty took place mainly in the eighteenth century. It began in two countries, England and France. The first of these knew liberty, the second did not.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

42. “Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic, and power-adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desirable if this world is to become a better.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

43. “To argue that this development has anything to do with the technological progress during this period, that technological necessities which in Germany operated in the 1880s and 1890s, made themselves felt here in the 1930s, is not much less absurd than the claim, implied in a statement of Mussolini, that Italy had to abolish individual freedom before other European people because its civilization had marched so far in advance of the rest!”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

44. “That people should wish to be relieved of the bitter choice which hard facts often impose upon them is not surprising. But few want to be relieved through having the choice made for them by others. People just wish that the choice should not be necessary at all. And they are only too ready to believe that the choice is not really necessary, that it is imposed upon them merely by the particular economic system under which we live. What they resent is, in truth, that there is an economic problem.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

45. “But believing in freedom means that we do not regard ourselves as the ultimate judges of another person’s values, that we do not feel entitled to prevent him from pursuing ends which we disapprove so long as he does not infringe the equally protected sphere of others. 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 A. Hayek

46. “They are all necessarily based on particular views about facts which are then elaborated into scientific theories in order to justify a preconceived opinion.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

47. “The argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument. The argument for individualism is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

48. “A movement whose main promise is the relief from responsibility6 cannot but be antimoral in its effect, however lofty the ideals to which it owes its birth.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

49. “The law can, and to make a central direction of economic activity possible must, legalize what to all intents and purposes remains arbitrary action. If the law says that such a board or authority may do what it pleases, anything that board or authority does is legal – but its actions are certainly not subject to the Rule of Law.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

50. “It is not any contempt for material welfare, or even any diminished desire for it, but, on the contrary, a refusal to recognize any obstacles, any conflict with other aims which might impede the fulfillment of their own desires, which distinguishes our generation.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek