Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Mean
Effort
Ruler
Much
Knowledge
Renunciation
Mind
Society
Comprehend
Make
Freedom
Wisest
Free
Rulers
Individual
Efforts
Use
Direct
Means
Control

More quotes by Friedrich August von Hayek

Image
If socialists understood economics, they wouldn't be socialist.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
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
Image
The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the wrong beliefs.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
[Socialistic] economic planning, regulation, and intervention pave the way to totalitarianism by building a power structure that will inevitably be seized by the most power-hungry and unscrupulous.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
We did not realise how fragile our civilisation was.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
It is of the essence of the demand for equality before the law that people should be treated alike in spite of the fact that they are different.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We must shed the illusion that we can deliberately 'create the future of mankind'
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
[The] impersonal process of the market ... can be neither just nor unjust, because the results are not intended or foreseen.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
The state itself becomes more and more identified with the interests of those who run things than with the interests of the people in general.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
... I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much undetermined and unpredictable, to a pretense of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
The mind cannot foresee its own advance.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
I regard it in fact as the great advantage of the mathematical technique that it allows us to describe, by means of algebraic equations, the general character of a pattern even where we are ignorant of the numerical values which will determine its particular manifestation.
Friedrich August von Hayek