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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
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Friedrich August von Hayek
Age: 92 †
Born: 1899
Born: May 8
Died: 1992
Died: March 23
Economist
Historian
Philosopher
Political Scientist
University Teacher
Vienna
Austria
Friedrich August von Hayek
Friedrich von Hayek
Friedrich A. von Hayek
Friedrich A. Von Hayek
F. A. von Hayek
Friedrich August Von Hayek
Hayek
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More quotes by Friedrich August von Hayek
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Our faith in freedom does not rest on the foreseeable results in particular circumstances, but on the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than for the bad ... Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom.
Friedrich August von Hayek
The history of government management of money has, except for a few short happy periods, been one of incessant fraud and deception.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Independence of mind or strength of character is rarely found among those who cannot be confident that they will make their way by their own effort.... Indeed, when security is understood in too absolute a sense, the general striving for it, far from increasing the chances of freedom, becomes the greatest threat to it.
Friedrich August von Hayek
The chief difference [between totalitarian and free countries] is that only the totalitarians appear clearly to know how they want to achieve that result, while the free world has only its past achievements to show, being by its very nature unable to offer any detailed plan for further growth.
Friedrich August von Hayek
There is, in a competitive society, nobody who can exercise even a fraction of the power which a socialist planning board would possess.
Friedrich August von Hayek
We did not realise how fragile our civilisation was.
Friedrich August von Hayek
It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.
Friedrich August von Hayek
If we can reduce the risk of friction likely to lead to war, this is probably all we can reasonably hope to achieve.
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I was quite depressed two weeks ago when I spent an afternoon at Brentano's Bookshop in New York and was looking at the kind of books most people read. That seems to be hopeless once you see that you lose all hope.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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
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.
Friedrich August von Hayek
We shall all be the gainers if we can create a world fit for small states to live in.
Friedrich August von Hayek
With the exception only of the period of the gold standard, practically all governments of history have used their exclusive power to issue money to defraud and plunder the people.
Friedrich August von Hayek
That democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something so utterly different that few of those who wish it would be prepared to accept the consequences, many will not believe until the connection has been laid bare in all its aspects.
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Our moral traditions developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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
Capitalism created the possibility of employment.
Friedrich August von Hayek
The younger generation of today has grown up in a world in which in school and press the spirit of commercial enterprise has been represented as disreputable and the making of profit as immoral, where to employ a hundred people is represented as exploitation but to command the same number as honorable.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Liberty'''.that condition of man in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as possible in society
Friedrich August von Hayek