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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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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
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More quotes by Friedrich August von Hayek

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I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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Freedom necessarily means that many things will be done which we do not like.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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The mind cannot foresee its own advance.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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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
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Economic transactions between national bodies who are at the same time the supreme judges of their own behavior, who bow to no superior law, and whose representatives cannot be bound by any considerations but the immediate interest of their respective nations, must end in clashes of power.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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It seems to be almost a law of human nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative program - on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off - than on any positive task.
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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From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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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
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If freedom is to flourish the philosophic foundations of a free society must be kept a living intellectual issue and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of the liveliest minds.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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Liberty'''.that condition of man in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as possible in society
Friedrich August von Hayek
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The idea of social justice is that the state should treat different people unequally in order to make them equal.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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There may be few instances in which the superstition that only measurable magnitudes can be important has done positive harm in the economic field: but the present inflation and employment problems are a very serious one.
Friedrich August von Hayek