Quote

It is neither necessary nor desirable that national boundaries should mark sharp differences in standards of living, that membership of a national group should entitle to a share in a cake altogether different from that in which members of other groups share.

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
Different
National
Altogether
Neither
Desirable
Members
Sharp
Necessary
Cake
Groups
Boundaries
Differences
Group
Share
Standards
Entitle
Living
Mark
Membership

More quotes by 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
It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
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
Image
Nothing is more securely lodged than the ignorance of the experts.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
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
Image
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
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 [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
Image
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
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
To create conditions in which competition will be as effective as possible, to prevent fraud and deception, to break up monopolies- these tasks provide a wide and unquestioned field for state activity.
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
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
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
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
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
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
Image
Socialism can only be put into practice only by methods which most socialists disapprove.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
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
Image
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