Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You can have economic freedom without political freedom, but you cannot have political freedom without economic freedom.
If democracy is a means rather than an end, its limits must be determined in the light of the purpose we want it to serve.
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
[The] impersonal process of the market ... can be neither just nor unjust, because the results are not intended or foreseen.
Freedom can be preserved only if it is treated as a supreme principle which must not be sacrificed for particular advantages.
To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about.
The history of government management of money has, except for a few short happy periods, been one of incessant fraud and deception.
Socialism is simply a re-assertion of that tribal ethics whose gradual weakening had made an approach to the Great Society possible.
Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong.
It is when it is contended that "in a democracy right is what the majority makes it to be" that democracy degenerates into demagoguery.
There is, in a competitive society, nobody who can exercise even a fraction of the power which a socialist planning board would possess.
I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it.
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.
Through the inevitable mismanagement of resources and goods at the disposal of the state, all forms of collectivism lead eventually to tyranny.
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.
We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Once wide coercive powers are given to governmental agencies for particular purposes, such powers cannot be effectively controlled by democratic assemblies.
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.
... 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.
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.
The freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use.
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.
By the time any view becomes a majority view, it is no longer the best view: somebody will already have advanced beyond the point which the majority have reached.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Should our moral beliefs really prove to be dependent on factual assumptions shown to be incorrect, it would be hardly moral to defend them by refusing to acknowledge the facts.
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.
The moral consequences of totalitarian propaganda...are destructive of all morals because they undermind one of the foundations of all morals: the sense of and respect for truth.
Few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and Nazism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.
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.
One need not be a prophet to be aware of impending dangers. An accidental combination of experience and interest will often reveal events to one man under aspects which few yet see.
[T]hose who are willing to surrender their freedom for security have always demanded that if they give up their full freedom it should also be taken from those not prepared to do so.
Humiliating to human pride as it may be, we must recognize that the advance and even the preservation of civilization are dependent upon a maximum of opportunity for accidents to happen.
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
The progress of the natural sciences in modern times has of course so much exceeded all expectations that any suggestion that there may be some limits to it is bound to arouse suspicion.
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.