110+ Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes On Education, Freedom And Technology

Friedrich August von Hayek was an Austrian economist and philosopher best known for his defense of classical liberalism. He argued that free markets and the protection of individual liberty were essential for the preservation of a free and prosperous society. Hayek's ideas had a major influence on the development of the modern libertarian movement. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Friedrich August von Hayek on education, freedom, technology.

Top 10 Friedrich August Von Hayek Quotes

1. If socialists understood economics, they wouldn't be socialist.
2. 'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.
3. [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.
4. In government, the scum rises to the top.
5. The more the state "plans" the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.
6. It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil.
7. The chief evil is unlimited government, and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power.
8. By giving the government unlimited powers, the most arbitrary rule can be made legal; and in this way a democracy may set up the most complete despotism imaginable.
9. The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
10. 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.

Friedrich August Von Hayek Short Quotes

• A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.
• Conservatism is only as good as what it conserves.
• Socialism can only be put into practice only by methods which most socialists disapprove.
• We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.
• Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion.
• Once politics become a tug-of-war for shares in the income pie, decent government is impossible.
• It is not the source but the limitation of power which prevents it from being arbitrary.
• Our alternative is either to stick to a moral tradition which we haven
• The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before the law.
• We shall all be the gainers if we can create a world fit for small states to live in.

Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes About Freedom

Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions. Liberty and responsibility are inseparable. — Friedrich August von Hayek

The individualist… recognizes the limitations of the powers of individual reason and consequently advocates freedom. — Friedrich August von Hayek

Nobody with open eyes can any longer doubt that the danger to personal freedom comes chiefly from the left. — Friedrich August von Hayek

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

We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice. — 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. — Friedrich August von Hayek

We can either have a free Parliament or a free people. Personal freedom requires that all authority is restrained by long-run principles which the opinion of the people approves. — Friedrich August von Hayek

A society that does not recognise that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom. — Friedrich August von Hayek

Money is one of the greatest instruments of freedom ever invented by man. It is money which in existing society opens an astounding range of choice to the poor man, a range greater than that which not many generations ago was open to the wealthy — Friedrich August von Hayek

It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend. — Friedrich August von Hayek

Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes About Future

Is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that, in our endeavour consciously to shape our future in accordance with high ideals, we should in fact unwittingly produce the very opposite of what we have been striving for? — Friedrich August von Hayek

Nowhere has democracy ever worked well without a great measure of local self-government, providing a school of political training for the people at large as much as for their future leaders. — Friedrich August von Hayek

Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong. — Friedrich August von Hayek

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

We must shed the illusion that we can deliberately 'create the future of mankind' — Friedrich August von Hayek

As is true with respect to other great evils, the measures by which war might be made altogether impossible for the future may well be worse than even war itself. — Friedrich August von Hayek

Socialism constitutes a threat to the present and future welfare of the human race, in the sense that neither socialism nor any other known substitute for the market order could sustain the current population of the world. — Friedrich August von Hayek

Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes About Fact

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

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

There can be little doubt that man owes some of his greatest successes in the past to the fact that he has not been able to control social life. His continued advance may well depend on his deliberately refraining from exercising controls which are now in his power. — Friedrich August von Hayek

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

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

Why should we, however, in economics, have to plead ignorance of the sort of facts on which, in the case of a physical theory, a scientist would certainly be expected to give precise information? — Friedrich August von Hayek

To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm. — Friedrich August von Hayek

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 — Friedrich August von Hayek

Without a theory the facts are silent. — Friedrich August von Hayek

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

Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes About Society

To discover the meaning of what is called "social justice" has been one of my chief preoccupations for more than 10 years. I have failed in this endeavour or rather, have reached the conclusion that, with reference to society of free men, the phrase has no meaning whatever. — Friedrich August von Hayek

The mischievous idea that all public needs should be satisfied by compulsory organization and that all the means that individuals are willing to devote to pubic purposes should be under the control of government, is wholly alien to the basic principles of a free society. — Friedrich August von Hayek

Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarianism which horrify us follow of necessity — Friedrich August von Hayek

There is only one '' principle that can preserve a free society: namely, the strict prevention of all coercion except in the enforcement of general abstract rules equally applicable to all. — Friedrich August von Hayek

Socialism is simply a re-assertion of that tribal ethics whose gradual weakening had made an approach to the Great Society possible. — Friedrich August von Hayek

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

The attitude of the liberal towards society is like that of the gardener who tends a plant and, in order to create the conditions most favorable to its growth, must know as much as possible about its structure and the way it functions. — Friedrich August von Hayek

The chief difference [between totalitarian and free countries] is that only the totalitarians appear clearly to know how they want to achieve that result, while the free world has only its past achievements to show, being by its very nature unable to offer any detailed "plan" for further growth. — Friedrich August von Hayek

There is, in a competitive society, nobody who can exercise even a fraction of the power which a socialist planning board would possess. — Friedrich August von Hayek

What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free. — Friedrich August von Hayek

Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes About Individual

Coercion is evil precisely because it eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another. — Friedrich August von Hayek

Individual liberty demonstrates that some manners of living are more successful than others. — Friedrich August von Hayek

Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions.... Liberty and responsibility are inseparable. — Friedrich August von Hayek

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

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

The advantage of a free market is that it allows millions of decision-makers to respond individually to freely determined prices, allocating resources - labor, capital and human ingenuity - in a manner that can't be mimicked by a central plan, however brilliant the central planner. — Friedrich August von Hayek

This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals. — Friedrich August von Hayek

The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess. — Friedrich August von Hayek

The guiding principle that a policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy remains as true today as it was in the nineteenth century. — Friedrich August von Hayek

It is because every individual knows little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it. — Friedrich August von Hayek

Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes About General

We know, in other words, the general conditions in which what we call, somewhat misleadingly, an equilibrium will establish itself: but we never know what the particular prices or wages are which would exist if the market were to bring about such an equilibrium. — Friedrich August von Hayek

The state itself becomes more and more identified with the interests of those who run things than with the interests of the people in general. — Friedrich August von Hayek

It is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the intellectual that he judges new ideas not by their specific merits but by the readiness with which they fit into his general conceptions, into the picture of the world which he regards as modern or advanced. — Friedrich August von Hayek

Friedrich August von Hayek Famous Quotes And Sayings

That democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something so utterly different that few of those who wish it would be prepared to accept the consequences, many will not believe until the connection has been laid bare in all its aspects. — Friedrich August von Hayek

The effect of the people's agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to take a journey together without agreeing where they want to go; with the result that they may all have to make a journey which most of them do not want at all. — Friedrich August von Hayek

The argument for liberty is… an argument… against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better. — Friedrich August von Hayek

Once wide coercive powers are given to government agencies… such powers cannot be effectively controlled. — Friedrich August von Hayek

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

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

Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rates higher and which lower, in short, what men should believe and strive for. — Friedrich August von Hayek

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

It is when it is contended that "in a democracy right is what the majority makes it to be" that democracy degenerates into demagoguery. — Friedrich August von Hayek

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. — Friedrich August von Hayek

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

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

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

The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule. — Friedrich August von Hayek

Through the inevitable mismanagement of resources and goods at the disposal of the state, all forms of collectivism lead eventually to tyranny. — Friedrich August von Hayek

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

The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better. — Friedrich August von Hayek

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

Competition is like experimentation in science, a discovery process, and it must rely on the self interest of producers, it must allow them to use their knowledge for their purposes, because nobody else possesses the information — Friedrich August von Hayek

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

This means that to entrust to science - or to deliberate control according to scientific principles - more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects. — Friedrich August von Hayek

The central problem of management is how spontaneous interaction of people within a firm, each possessing only bits of knowledge, can bring about the competitive success that could only be achieved by the deliberate direction of a senior management that possesses the combined knowledge of all employees and contractors — Friedrich August von Hayek

There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. — Friedrich August von Hayek

Civilization enables us constantly to profit from knowledge which we individually do not possess and because each individual's use of his particular knowledge may serve to assist others unknown to him in achieving their ends that men as members of civilized society can pursue their individual ends so much more successfully than they could alone. — Friedrich August von Hayek

And who will deny that a world in which the wealthy are powerful is still a better world than one in which only the already powerful can acquire wealth? — Friedrich August von Hayek

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

Nothing distinguishes more clearly conditions in a free country from those in a country under arbitrary government than the observance in the former of the great principles known as the Rule of Law. — Friedrich August von Hayek

We shall never prevent the abuse of power if we are not prepared to limit power in a way which occasionally may prevent its use for desirable purposes. — Friedrich August von Hayek

I have come to feel strongly that the greatest service I can still render to my fellow men would be that I could make the speakers and writers among them thoroughly ashamed ever again to employ the term "social justice. — Friedrich August von Hayek

If the resources of different nations are treated as exclusive properties of these nations as wholes, if international economic relations, instead of being relations between individuals, become increasingly relations between whole nations organized as trading bodies, they inevitably become the source of friction and envy between whole nations. — Friedrich August von Hayek

Many who think themselves infinitely superior to the aberrations of Nazism, and sincerely hate all manifestations, work at the same time for ideals whose realization would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny. — Friedrich August von Hayek

With the exception only of the period of the gold standard, practically all governments of history have used their exclusive power to issue money to defraud and plunder the people. — Friedrich August von Hayek

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

With the exception only of the period of the gold standard, practically all governments of history have used their exclusive power to issue money to defraud and plunder the people. — Friedrich August von Hayek

There is nothing in the basic principles of liberalism to make it a stationary creed; there are no hard-and-fast rules fixed once and for all. ... Probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez faire. — Friedrich August von Hayek

The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest "functionaire" possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose desecration it depends whether and how I am allowed to live or to work. — Friedrich August von Hayek

Without the rich - without those who accumulated capital - those poor who could exist at all would be very much poorer indeed, scratching a livelihood from marginal lands on which every drought would kill most of the children they would be trying to raise. — Friedrich August von Hayek

Our faith in freedom does not rest on the foreseeable results in particular circumstances, but on the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than for the bad ... Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom. — Friedrich August von Hayek

You can have economic freedom without political freedom, but you cannot have political freedom without economic freedom. — Friedrich August von Hayek

We must not forget that … monetary policy all over the world has followed the advice of the stabilizers. It is high time that their influence, which has already done harm enough, should be overthrown. — Friedrich August von Hayek

The history of government management of money has, except for a few short happy periods, been one of incessant fraud and deception. — Friedrich August von Hayek

...the case for individual freedom rests largely on the recognition of the inevitable and universal ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievements of our ends and welfare depend. — Friedrich August von Hayek

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

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

The credit which the apparent conformity with recognized scientific standards can gain for seemingly simple but false theories may, as the present instance shows, have grave consequences. — Friedrich August von Hayek

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

Justice, like liberty and coercion, is a concept which, for the sake of clarity, ought to be confined to the deliberate treatment of men by other men. — Friedrich August von Hayek

The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. — Friedrich August von Hayek

It used to be the boast of free men that, so long as they kept within the bounds of the known law, there was no need to ask anybody's permission or to obey anybody's orders. It is doubtful whether any of us can make this claim today. — Friedrich August von Hayek

Independence of mind or strength of character is rarely found among those who cannot be confident that they will make their way by their own effort.... Indeed, when security is understood in too absolute a sense, the general striving for it, far from increasing the chances of freedom, becomes the greatest threat to it. — Friedrich August von Hayek

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

Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones. — Friedrich August von Hayek

To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about. — Friedrich August von Hayek

Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom. — Friedrich August von Hayek

Inflation is probably the most important single factor in that vicious circle wherein one kind of government action makes more and more government control necessary. For this reason all those who wish to stop the drift toward increasing government control should concentrate their effort on monetary policy. — Friedrich August von Hayek

... 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

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

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

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

Life Lessons by Friedrich August von Hayek

1. Friedrich August von Hayek taught us the importance of economic freedom, the dangers of government intervention in the economy, and the power of the free market to create wealth and opportunity.
2. He also warned us of the dangers of collectivism, and the potential for governments to abuse their power if left unchecked.
3. Hayek's work has been influential in the development of economic theory, and his ideas continue to shape modern economic thought.