Friedrich Hayek
Champion of classical liberalism, Road to Serfdom
Most quoted
"The marvel is that in a case like that of a scarcity of one raw material, without an order being issued, without more than perhaps a handful of people knowing the cause, tens of thousands of people whose identity could not be ascertained by months of investigation, are made to use the material or its products more sparingly."
— from The Use of Knowledge in Society, 1945
"I am convinced that if it were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aim, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind."
— from The Use of Knowledge in Society, 1945
"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 trying to do better."
— from The Constitution of Liberty, 1960
All quotes by Friedrich Hayek (235)
The rule of law is the absence of arbitrary power.
Knowledge is dispersed among individuals, and no single mind can possess it all.
Freedom is not an end in itself, but a means to achieve higher ends.
The delusion that by means of government we can eliminate all the problems of life is a dangerous one.
Tradition is a guide, not a jailer.
The market is a mechanism for utilizing knowledge which no one possesses as a whole.
In a free society, the state does not aim either at material or moral benefits; it provides the framework within which each can seek his own.
The spontaneous order of society is the result of human action but not of human design.
I do not think it is an exaggeration to say history is largely a struggle for the recognition of this principle.
The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy.
My hope is that the Nobel Prize will make people listen to what I have to say.
The more the state 'plans,' the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.
The chief merit of the free market is that it is a system in which bad men can do least harm.
There is no other way toward the establishment of a peaceful international order or a liberal internal order than the way of the market.
The price system is a mechanism for communicating information.
The more we try to control economic life, the more we are driven to central planning.
The case for individual liberty rests largely on the recognition of the inevitable ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievement of our ends and welfare depends.
The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been to protect the individual from the arbitrary power of others.
The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate 'given' resources—if 'given' is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem.
The more complex the society, the more essential is the market mechanism.
Contemporaries of Friedrich Hayek
Other Economicss born within 50 years of Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992).