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... 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

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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
Prefer
Leaves
False
Likely
Undetermined
Knowledge
Pretense
True
Unpredictable
Even
Exact
Much
Imperfect

More quotes by Friedrich August von Hayek

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The younger generation of today has grown up in a world in which in school and press the spirit of commercial enterprise has been represented as disreputable and the making of profit as immoral, where to employ a hundred people is represented as exploitation but to command the same number as honorable.
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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
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Whenever it is necessary that one of several conflicting opinions should prevail and when one would have to be made to prevail by force if need be, it is less wasteful to determine which has the stronger support by counting numbers than by fighting.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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We shall all be the gainers if we can create a world fit for small states to live in.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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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
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Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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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
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This is the constitutional limitation of man's knowledge and interests, the fact that he cannot know more than a tiny part of the whole of society and that therefore all that can enter into his motives are the immediate effects which his actions will have in the sphere he knows.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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The greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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Competition means decentralized planning by many separate persons.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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[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
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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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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
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If we can reduce the risk of friction likely to lead to war, this is probably all we can reasonably hope to achieve.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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Never will man penetrate deeper into error than when he is continuing on a road which has led him to great success
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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It is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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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
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The more the state plans the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.
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