Top 140 Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The idea of social justice is that the state should treat different people unequally in order to make them equal.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

2. “If socialists understood economics, they wouldn’t be socialist.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

3. “Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

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4. “In government, the scum rises to the top.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

5. “There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

6. “You can have economic freedom without political freedom, but you cannot have political freedom without economic freedom.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

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

— Friedrich August von Hayek

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8. “A society that does not recognise 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 August von Hayek

9. “To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

10. “Conservatism is only as good as what it conserves.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

11. “Any man who is only an economist is unlikely to be a good one.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

12. “The more the state “plans” the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

13. “It is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

14. “Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

15. “Social justice rests on the hate towards those that enjoy a comfortable position, namely, upon envy.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

16. “The chief evil is unlimited government, and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

17. “A policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

18. “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 August von Hayek

19. “The idea that human kind can shape the world according to wish is what I call the fatal conceit.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

20. “A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

21. “Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

22. “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 August von Hayek

23. “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 August von Hayek

24. “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 August von Hayek

25. “Through the inevitable mismanagement of resources and goods at the disposal of the state, all forms of collectivism lead eventually to tyranny.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

26. “The history of government management of money has, except for a few short happy periods, been one of incessant fraud and deception.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

27. “We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

28. “The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

29. “Without a theory the facts are silent.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

30. “We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

31. “We must raise and train an army of fighters for freedom.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

32. “When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

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

— Friedrich August von Hayek

34. “By giving the government unlimited powers, the most arbitrary rule can be made legal; and in this way a democracy may set up the most complete despotism imaginable.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

35. “Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

36. “Competition is like experimentation in science, a discovery process, and it must rely on the self interest of producers, it must allow them to use their knowledge for their purposes, because nobody else possesses the information.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

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37. “Nowhere has democracy ever worked well without a great measure of local self-government, providing a school of political training for the people at large as much as for their future leaders.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

38. “With the exception only of the period of the gold standard, practically all governments of history have used their exclusive power to issue money to defraud and plunder the people.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

39. “Once politics become a tug-of-war for shares in the income pie, decent government is impossible.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

40. “Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

41. “Our moral traditions developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

42. “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 August von Hayek

43. “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 August von Hayek

44. “Once wide coercive powers are given to governmental agencies for particular purposes, such powers cannot be effectively controlled by democratic assemblies.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

45. “The mischievous idea that all public needs should be satisfied by compulsory organization and that all the means that individuals are willing to devote to pubic purposes should be under the control of government, is wholly alien to the basic principles of a free society.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

46. “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 August von Hayek

47. “The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

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

— Friedrich August von Hayek

49. “Humiliating to human pride as it may be, we must recognize that the advance and even the preservation of civilization are dependent upon a maximum of opportunity for accidents to happen.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

50. “I was quite depressed two weeks ago when I spent an afternoon at Brentano’s Bookshop in New York and was looking at the kind of books most people read. Once you see that you lose all hope.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

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