Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes about Liberty

'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

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

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Liberty is an opportunity for doing good, but this is only so when it is also an opportunity for doing wrong.

Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.

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.

The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before the law.

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

...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.

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

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.

Liberty'''.that condition of man in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as possible in society

At a time when most movements that are thought to be progressive advocate further encroachments on individual liberty, those who cherish freedom are likely to expend their energies in opposition. In this they find themselves much of the time on the same side as those who habitually resist change.

I am still puzzled why those in the United States who truly believe in liberty should not only have allowed the left to appropriate this almost indispensable term but should even have assisted by beginning to use it themselves as a term of opprobrium. This seems to be particularly regrettable because of the consequent tendency of many true liberals to describe themselves as conservatives.