“A growing number of economists who have not the slightest sentimental attachment to conservatism—and many of whom began as socialists—feel more and more compelled by their reasoning to take a conservative attitude towards many problems.”

— Friedrich Hayek

“More harm and misery have likely been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil.”

— Friedrich Hayek

“The idea of social justice is that the state should treat different people unequally in order to make them equal.”

— Friedrich Hayek

British PM Margaret Thatcher:

“Friedrich Hayek is the prophet not of doom and disaster, but of peace and plenty. His is a voice of wisdom for our time, and for all time. We should listen to him.”

“Nothing is more perni­cious to intellectual honesty than pride in not having changed one’s opinions—particularly if these are opinions which are regarded as ‘progressive’ or ‘advanced’ or just modern. You will soon enough discover that what you regard as specially advanced

“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 Hayek

“In the end somebody’s views will have to decide whose interests are more important, and these views must become part of the law of the land. Hence the familiar fact that the more the state ‘plans’ the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”

— Friedrich Hayek

“Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his absolute mercy.”

— Friedrich Hayek

“To act on behalf of a group seems to free people of many of the moral restraints which control their behavior as individuals within the group.”

— Friedrich Hayek

“I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much indetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.”

— Friedrich 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 Hayek

“Conservatism is only as good as what it conserves.”

— Friedrich Hayek

“The free market constitutes an information-gathering process, able to call up, and to put to use, widely dispersed information that no central planning agency, let alone any individual, could know as a whole, possess or control.”

— Friedrich Hayek

“The supreme tragedy is still not seen that in Germany it was largely people of good will, men who were admired and held up as models in the democratic countries, who prepared the way for, if they did not actually create, the forces which now stand for everything they detest.”

“Never will man penetrate deeper into error than when he is continuing on a road which has led him to great success.”

— Friedrich Hayek

“Many who think themselves infinitely superior to the aberrations of naziism, and sincerely hate all its manifestations, work at the same time for ideals whose realization would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny.”

— Friedrich Hayek

“Man will 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 Hayek

“Socialist 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.”

— Friedrich Hayek

“Few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and naziism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.”

— Friedrich Hayek

“The great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently. On most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another.”

— Friedrich Hayek