Top 140 Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “As is true with respect to other great evils, the measures by which war might be made altogether impossible for the future may well be worse than even war itself.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

102. “This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

103. “Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

104. “If most people are not willing to see the difficulty, this is mainly because, consciously or unconsciously, they assume that it will be they who will settle these questions for the others, and because they are convinced of their own capacity to do this.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

105. “The credit which the apparent conformity with recognized scientific standards can gain for seemingly simple but false theories may, as the present instance shows, have grave consequences.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

106. “That there is little hope of international order or lasting peace so long as every country is free to employ whatever measures it thinks desirable in its own immediate interest, however damaging they may be to others, needs little emphasis now.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

107. “Economic transactions between national bodies who are at the same time the supreme judges of their own behavior, who bow to no superior law, and whose representatives cannot be bound by any considerations but the immediate interest of their respective nations, must end in clashes of power.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

108. “It used to be the boast of free men that, so long as they kept within the bounds of the known law, there was no need to ask anybody’s permission or to obey anybody’s orders. It is doubtful whether any of us can make this claim today.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

109. “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 August von Hayek

110. “Perhaps even more than elsewhere current notions of what is desirable and practicable are here still of a kind which may well produce the opposite of what they promise.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

111. “I do not think it is an exaggeration to say history is largely a history of inflation, usually inflations engineered by governments for the gain of governments.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

112. “Nothing is more securely lodged than the ignorance of the experts.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

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

— Friedrich August von Hayek

114. “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 August von Hayek

115. “No human mind can comprehend all the knowledge which guides the actions of society.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

116. “Freedom necessarily means that many things will be done which we do not like.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

117. “The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the “wrong” beliefs.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

118. “To discover the meaning of what is called “social justice” has been one of my chief preoccupations for more than 10 years. I have failed in this endeavour or rather, have reached the conclusion that, with reference to society of free men, the phrase has no meaning whatever.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

119. “Many who think themselves infinitely superior to the aberrations of Nazism, and sincerely hate all manifestations, work at the same time for ideals whose realization would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

120. “Competition means decentralized planning by many separate persons.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

121. “This means that to entrust to science – or to deliberate control according to scientific principles – more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

122. “Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one’s government is not necessarily to secure freedom.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

123. “If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

124. “From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

125. “The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

126. “I am certain, however, that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

127. “Socialism can only be put into practice only by methods which most socialists disapprove.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

128. “The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before the law.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

129. “In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

130. “The attitude of the liberal towards society is like that of the gardener who tends a plant and, in order to create the conditions most favorable to its growth, must know as much as possible about its structure and the way it functions.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

131. “There can be little doubt that man owes some of his greatest successes in the past to the fact that he has not been able to control social life. His continued advance may well depend on his deliberately refraining from exercising controls which are now in his power.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

132. “I have arrived at the conviction that the neglect by economists to discuss seriously what is really the crucial problem of our time is due to a certain timidity about soiling their hands by going from purely scientific questions into value questions.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

133. “It can hardly be denied that such a demand quite arbitrarily limits the facts which are to be admitted as possible causes of the events which occur in the real world.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

134. “It is because every individual knows little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

135. “It is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the intellectual that he judges new ideas not by their specific merits but by the readiness with which they fit into his general conceptions, into the picture of the world which he regards as modern or advanced.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

136. “The Germans would appear as the disturbers of peace, as they already do to some people, merely because they were the first to take the path along which all the others were ultimately to follow.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

137. “There may be few instances in which the superstition that only measurable magnitudes can be important has done positive harm in the economic field: but the present inflation and employment problems are a very serious one.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

138. “To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

139. “Socialism constitutes a threat to the present and future welfare of the human race, in the sense that neither socialism nor any other known substitute for the market order could sustain the current population of the world.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

140. “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 August von Hayek

141. “It is when it is contended that “in a democracy right is what the majority makes it to be” that democracy degenerates into demagoguery.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

142. “The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

143. “The state itself becomes more and more identified with the interests of those who run things than with the interests of the people in general.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

144. “Whatever men live for, today most live only because of the market order.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

145. “We have indeed at the moment little cause for pride: as a profession we have made a mess of things.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

146. “We certainly do not regard it as right that the citizens of a large country should dominate those of a small adjoining country merely because they are more numerous.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

147. “Liberty is an opportunity for doing good, but this is only so when it is also an opportunity for doing wrong.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek