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 more we try to control economic life, the more we are driven to control all life.
The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been to protect the individual from the arbitrary power of the state.
The most important political problem of our time is how to limit the power of government.
Nobody can be a great economist who is only an economist.
The state is a means, not an end.
The problem is not whether we should have a planned economy, but whether planning should be done by individuals or by the state.
The economic freedom which is the prerequisite of any other freedom cannot be the freedom from economic care which the socialists promise us.
If socialists understood economics, they wouldn't be socialists.
We are all socialists now, or so it seems.
The case for individual freedom rests largely on the recognition of the inevitable ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors which would determine the success of our endeavors.
The ultimate source of the evil is always the same: the attempt to make man master of his own destiny.
The demand for security is one of the most insidious enemies of liberty.
Emergencies have always been the pretext for the repudiation of treaties.
The problem is not whether we should have planning, but whether planning should be done by individuals or by the state.
The desire for security is one of the most insidious enemies of liberty.
If we are to use the knowledge of a society, we must use the knowledge of all its members. But this knowledge is dispersed and often contradictory.
We must make the planning for freedom, and not for security, our guiding principle.
The ultimate ends of human activities are all ends in themselves, or ultimate values, which cannot be justified by anything else.
The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been to abolish that control of the individual by the state which is so characteristic of all forms of totalitarianism.
Individual freedom, wherever it has existed, has been inseparable from the recognition of individual property.
Contemporaries of Friedrich Hayek
Other Economicss born within 50 years of Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992).