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

More quotes by Friedrich August von Hayek

Image
It is not the source but the limitation of power which prevents it from being arbitrary.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
Without the rich - without those who accumulated capital - those poor who could exist at all would be very much poorer indeed, scratching a livelihood from marginal lands on which every drought would kill most of the children they would be trying to raise.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
The idea of social justice is that the state should treat different people unequally in order to make them equal.
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
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
Image
The attitude of the liberal towards society is like that of the gardener who tends a plant and, in order to create the conditions most favorable to its growth, must know as much as possible about its structure and the way it functions.
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
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
Image
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
Image
To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
Conservatism is only as good as what it conserves.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
The progress of the natural sciences in modern times has of course so much exceeded all expectations that any suggestion that there may be some limits to it is bound to arouse suspicion.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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?
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
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
Image
Once politics become a tug-of-war for shares in the income pie, decent government is impossible.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
The conservative feels safe and content only if he is assured that some higher wisdom watches and supervises change, only if he knows that some authority is charged with keeping the change orderly.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
We can either have a free Parliament or a free people. Personal freedom requires that all authority is restrained by long-run principles which the opinion of the people approves.
Friedrich August von Hayek