260 Quotes by Friedrich August von Hayek

While an equality of rights under a limited government is possible and an essential condition of individual freedom, a claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.

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.

The more I learn about the evolution of ideas, the more I have become aware that I am simply an unrepentant Old Whig-with the stress on the "old.

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.

We have indeed at the moment little cause for pride: as a profession we have made a mess of things.

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.

Hayek was making us think of the productive process as a process in time, inputs coming before outputs.

It is not the source but the limitation of power which prevents it from being arbitrary.

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.