It is tempting to believe that social evils arise from the activities of evil men and that if only good men (like ourselves, naturally) wielded power, all would be well. That view requires only emotion and self-praise - easy to come by and satisfying as well. To understand why it is that 'good' men in positions of power will produce… — Friedrich August von Hayek Copy Share
All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in… — Friedrich August von Hayek Copy Share Image
All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in… — Friedrich August von Hayek Copy Share Image
As is true with respect to other great evils, the measures by which war might be made altogether impossible for the future… — Friedrich August von Hayek Copy Share Image
There can be little doubt that man owes some of his greatest successes in the past to the fact that he has… — Friedrich August von Hayek Copy Share Image
Perhaps even more than elsewhere current notions of what is desirable and practicable are here still of a kind which may well… — Friedrich August von Hayek Copy Share Image
Nowhere has democracy ever worked well without a great measure of local self-government, providing a school of political training for the people… — Friedrich August von Hayek Copy Share Image
There exists no third principle for the organisation of the economics process which can be rationally chosen to achieve any desirable ends,… — Friedrich August von Hayek Copy Share Image
The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those… — Friedrich August von Hayek Copy Share Image
By the time any view becomes a majority view, it is no longer the best view: somebody will already have advanced beyond the point… — Friedrich August von Hayek Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Should our moral beliefs really prove to be dependent on factual assumptions shown to be incorrect, it would be hardly moral to defend them… — Friedrich August von Hayek Copy Share Image
It is true that the virtues which are less esteemed and practiced now--independence, self-reliance, and the willingness to bear risks, the readiness to back one's own conviction against a majority, and the willingness to voluntary cooperation with one's neighbors--are essentially those on which the of an individualist society rests. Collectivism has nothing to put in their place, and in so… — Friedrich August von Hayek Copy Share
Unlike the rationalism of the French Revolution, true liberalism has no quarrel with religion, and I can only deplore the militant and essentially illiberal antireligionism which animated so much of nineteenth-century Continental liberalism. ... What distinguishes the liberal from the conservative here is that, however profound his own spiritual beliefs, he will never regard himself as entitled to impose them… — Friedrich August von Hayek Copy Share
We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage… Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we… — Friedrich August von Hayek Copy Share
The central problem of management is how spontaneous interaction of people within a firm, each possessing only bits of knowledge, can bring about the… — Friedrich August von Hayek Copy Share Image
The discussions of every age are filled with the issues on which its leading schools of thought differ. But the general intellectual atmosphere of… — Friedrich August von Hayek Copy Share Image
The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess. — Friedrich August von Hayek Copy Share Image
[Socialistic] economic planning, regulation, and intervention pave the way to totalitarianism by building a power structure that will inevitably be seized by the most… — Friedrich August von Hayek Copy Share Image
It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends… — Friedrich August von Hayek Copy Share Image