Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes

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  There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

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• [There is] a delusion that macro-economics is both viable and useful (a delusion encouraged by its extensive use of mathematics, which must always impress politicians lacking any mathematical education, and which is really the nearest thing to the practice of magic that occurs among professional economists).

  Friedrich August von Hayek

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• We are only beginning to understand on how subtle a communication system the functioning of an advanced industrial society is based—a communications system which we call the market and which turns out to be a more efficient mechanism for digesting dispersed information than any that man has deliberately designed.

  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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• Our moral traditions developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

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• A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

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  Tags in Government, Position

• ‘Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

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  Tags in Individual, Safeguards

• Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality – an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

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  Tags in Individual, Means, Determination

• Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

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  Tags in Freedom, Effects

• He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Topics in Knowledge

  Tags in Environment, Results

• I do not think it is an exaggeration to say history is largely a history of inflation, usually inflations engineered by governments for the gain of governments.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

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  Tags in Think, Governments, Largely

• I have arrived at the conviction that the neglect by economists to discuss seriously what is really the crucial problem of our time is due to a certain timidity about soiling their hands by going from purely scientific questions into value questions.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

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  Tags in Questions, Problem, Really

• 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

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  Tags in Advantage, General, Technique

• If most people are not willing to see the difficulty, this is mainly because, consciously or unconsciously, they assume that it will be they who will settle these questions for the others, and because they are convinced of their own capacity to do this.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

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  Tags in Questions, Convinced, Difficulty

• If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

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  Tags in Sufficient, Recognize, Free

• Intellects whose desires have outstripped their understanding.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

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  Tags in Desires, Understanding

• It can hardly be denied that such a demand quite arbitrarily limits the facts which are to be admitted as possible causes of the events which occur in the real world.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

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  Tags in World, Possible, Demand

• 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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  Tags in Importance, Secure, Problem

• 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

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  Tags in Differences, Decide, Questions

• Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one’s government is not necessarily to secure freedom.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

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  Tags in Freedom, Complete, Understand

Friedrich August von Hayek (31)

Birth:	8th May, 1899
Death:	23rd March, 1992
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Economist, Philosopher

About

Friedrich August von Hayek was born in Vienna, Cisleithania, Austria-Hungary. He was an Austrian-born British economist and philosopher best known for his defense of classical liberalism. He shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Gunnar Myrdal for his "pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and ... penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena." He earned doctorates in law and political science from University of Vienna in 1921 and 1923. He spent most of his academic life at the London School of Economics, the University of Chicago, and the University of Freiburg. He wrote several books include: The Road to Serfdom, The Constitution of Liberty, Law, Legislation and Liberty, The Fatal Conceit, and Individualism and Economic Order. He received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991 from President George H. W. Bush.

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