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The greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good.

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
F. A. Hayek
Good
Liberty
Efficient
Men
Modern
Experts
Economic
Economics
Public
Regard
Powerful
Concerned
Administrators
Comes
Danger
Exclusively
Government
Needed
Namely
Today
Greatest
Expert

More quotes by Friedrich August von Hayek

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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.
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The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest functionaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose desecration it depends whether and how I am allowed to live or to work.
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Why should we, however, in economics, have to plead ignorance of the sort of facts on which, in the case of a physical theory, a scientist would certainly be expected to give precise information?
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Least of all shall we preserve democracy or foster its growth if all the power and most of the important decisions rest with an organization far too big for the common man to survey or comprehend.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest it is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rates higher and which lower, in short, what men should believe and strive for.
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At a time when most movements that are thought to be progressive advocate further encroachments on individual liberty, those who cherish freedom are likely to expend their energies in opposition. In this they find themselves much of the time on the same side as those who habitually resist change.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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The more the state plans the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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We shall all be the gainers if we can create a world fit for small states to live in.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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No human mind can comprehend all the knowledge which guides the actions of society.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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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
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We certainly do not regard it as right that the citizens of a large country should dominate those of a small adjoining country merely because they are more numerous.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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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
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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.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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The problems raised by a conscious direction of economic affairs on a national scale inevitably assume even greater dimensions when the same is attempted internationally. The conflict between planning and freedom cannot but become more serious as the similarity of standards and values among those submitted to a unitary plan diminishes.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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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
Friedrich August von Hayek
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The effect of the people's agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to take a journey together without agreeing where they want to go with the result that they may all have to make a journey which most of them do not want at all.
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The [classical] liberal, of course, does not deny that there are some superior people -- he is not an egalitarian -- but he denies that anyone has authority to decide who these superior people are.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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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
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Once wide coercive powers are given to governmental agencies for particular purposes, such powers cannot be effectively controlled by democratic assemblies.
Friedrich August von Hayek