Top 140 Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “If freedom is to flourish the philosophic foundations of a free society must be kept a living intellectual issue and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of the liveliest minds.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

53. “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 August von Hayek

54. “We shall all be the gainers if we can create a world fit for small states to live in.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

55. “It is no accident that on the whole there was more beauty and decency to be found in the life of the small peoples, and that among the large ones there was more happiness and content in proportion as they had avoided the deadly blight of centralization.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

56. “The greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

57. “It is of the essence of the demand for equality before the law that people should be treated alike in spite of the fact that they are different.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

58. “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

59. “There is, in a competitive society, nobody who can exercise even a fraction of the power which a socialist planning board would possess.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

60. “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 August von Hayek

61. “Should our moral beliefs really prove to be dependent on factual assumptions shown to be incorrect, it would be hardly moral to defend them by refusing to acknowledge the facts.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

62. “Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

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

— Friedrich August von Hayek

64. “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 August von Hayek

65. “The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest “functionaire” possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose desecration it depends whether and how I am allowed to live or to work.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

66. “Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement. It is by no means an obvious remedy for the obvious evil which the interests of that class will necessarily demand. It is a construction of theorists.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

67. “Few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and naziism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

68. “The mind cannot foresee its own advance.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

69. “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 August von Hayek

70. “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 August von Hayek

71. “Nobody with open eyes can any longer doubt that the danger to personal freedom comes chiefly from the left.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

72. “Capitalism created the possibility of employment.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

73. “It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

74. “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 August von Hayek

75. “If democracy is a means rather than an end, its limits must be determined in the light of the purpose we want it to serve.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

76. “It is neither necessary nor desirable that national boundaries should mark sharp differences in standards of living, that membership of a national group should entitle to a share in a cake altogether different from that in which members of other groups share.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

77. “He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

78. “It would clearly not be an improvement to build all houses exactly alike in order to create a perfect market for houses, and the same is true of most other fields where differences between the individual products prevent competition from ever being perfect.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

79. “One need not be a prophet to be aware of impending dangers. An accidental combination of experience and interest will often reveal events to one man under aspects which few yet see.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

80. “I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

81. “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 August von Hayek

82. “We know, in other words, the general conditions in which what we call, somewhat misleadingly, an equilibrium will establish itself: but we never know what the particular prices or wages are which would exist if the market were to bring about such an equilibrium.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

83. “The progress of the natural sciences in modern times has of course so much exceeded all expectations that any suggestion that there may be some limits to it is bound to arouse suspicion.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

84. “In no other field has the world yet paid so dearly for the abandonment of nineteenth-century liberalism as in the field where the retreat began: in international relations. Yet only a small part of the lesson which experience ought to have taught us has been learned.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

85. “If I am not mistaken, psychology, psychiatry and some branches of sociology, not to speak about the so-called philosophy of history, are even more affected by what I have called the scientistic prejudice, and by specious claims of what science can achieve.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

86. “Justice, like liberty and coercion, is a concept which, for the sake of clarity, ought to be confined to the deliberate treatment of men by other men.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

87. “If we can reduce the risk of friction likely to lead to war, this is probably all we can reasonably hope to achieve.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

88. “We did not realise how fragile our civilisation was.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

89. “I regard it in fact as the great advantage of the mathematical technique that it allows us to describe, by means of algebraic equations, the general character of a pattern even where we are ignorant of the numerical values which will determine its particular manifestation.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

90. “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 August von Hayek

91. “Socialism is simply a re-assertion of that tribal ethics whose gradual weakening had made an approach to the Great Society possible.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

92. “Without the rich – without those who accumulated capital – those poor who could exist at all would be very much poorer indeed, scratching a livelihood from marginal lands on which every drought would kill most of the children they would be trying to raise.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

93. “We know: of course, with regard to the market and similar social structures, a great many facts which we cannot measure and on which indeed we have only some very imprecise and general information.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

94. “It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

95. “Why should we, however, in economics, have to plead ignorance of the sort of facts on which, in the case of a physical theory, a scientist would certainly be expected to give precise information?”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

96. “Hayek was making us think of the productive process as a process in time, inputs coming before outputs.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

97. “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 August von Hayek

98. “Wherever liberty as we understand it has been destroyed, this has almost always been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

99. “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 August von Hayek

100. “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 August von Hayek