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Conservatism is only as good as what it conserves.
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
Conserves
Conservatism
Good
More quotes by Friedrich August von Hayek
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 doing better.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Planning leads to dictatorship because dictatorship is the most effective instrument of coercion and the enforcement of ideals and, as such, essential if central planning on a large scale is to be possible.
Friedrich August von Hayek
The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before the law.
Friedrich August von Hayek
We must shed the illusion that we can deliberately create the future of mankind. This is the final conclusion of the forty years which I have now devoted to the study of these problems
Friedrich August von Hayek
The mischievous idea that all public needs should be satisfied by compulsory organization and that all the means that individuals are willing to devote to pubic purposes should be under the control of government, is wholly alien to the basic principles of a free society.
Friedrich August von Hayek
It may be that a free society... carries in itself the forces of its own destruction, that once freedom has been achieved it is taken for granted and ceases to be valued, and that the free growth of ideas which is the essence of a free society will bring about the destruction of the foundations on which it depends.
Friedrich August von Hayek
To combat depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection -- a procedure which can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end.
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
It is only because the majority opinion will always be opposed by some that our knowledge and understanding progress... it is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.
Friedrich August von Hayek
The more I learn about the evolution of ideas, the more I have become aware that I am simply an unrepentant Old Whig-with the stress on the old.
Friedrich August von Hayek
And it's a necessity [for journalists] to pretend to be competent on every subject, some of which they really do not understand. They are under that necessity, I regret I'm sorry for them. But to pretend to understand all the things you write about, and habitually to write about things you do not understand, is a very corrupting thing.
Friedrich August von Hayek
I am convinced that if the market system 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 aims, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind.
Friedrich August von Hayek
We know: of course, with regard to the market and similar social structures, a great many facts which we cannot measure and on which indeed we have only some very imprecise and general information.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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
Nothing is more securely lodged than the ignorance of the experts.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Any man who is only an economist is unlikely to be a good one.
Friedrich August von Hayek
[The] impersonal process of the market ... can be neither just nor unjust, because the results are not intended or foreseen.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Unlike liberalism, with its fundamental belief in the long-range power of ideas, conservatism is bound by the stock of ideas inherited at a given time. And since it does not really believe in the power of argument, its last resort is generally a claim to superior wisdom, based on some self-arrogated superior quality.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Competition means decentralized planning by many separate persons.
Friedrich August von Hayek
