Quotes from Friedrich August von Hayek

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.

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.

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

The conservative feels safe and content only if he is assured that some higher wisdom watches and supervises change, only if he knows that some authority is charged with keeping the change "orderly.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Liberty'''.that condition of man in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as possible in society

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

We must shed the illusion that we can deliberately 'create the future of mankind'