“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.” — Friedrich Hayek

“Teachers, journalists, and other ‘second-hand dealers in ideas,’ appoint themselves as representatives of modern thought, as persons superior in knowledge and moral virtue to any who retain a high regard for traditional values.” — Friedrich Hayek

Milton Friedman on Hayek’s influence

“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

“We must find a new limit for the activities of government, a limit which leaves ample scope for sensible experimentation but which secures the freedom of the individual as the mainspring of all social and political activity.” — Friedrich Hayek

“Once wide coercive powers are given to government agencies, such powers cannot be effectively controlled.” — Friedrich Hayek

“Any kind of discrimination—be it on grounds of religion, political opinion, race, or whatever it is—seems to be incompatible with the idea of freedom under the law. Experience has shown that separate never is equal and cannot be equal.” — Friedrich Hayek

“The individual would more than ever become a mere means, to be used by the authority in the service of such abstractions as the ‘social welfare’ or the ‘good of the community.’” — Friedrich Hayek

“What in Europe was called ‘liberalism’ was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense.” — Friedrich Hayek

“Hitler did not have to destroy democracy; he merely took advantage of the decay of democracy and at the critical moment obtained the support of many to whom, though they detested Hitler, he yet seemed the only man strong enough to get things done.” — Friedrich Hayek

“Though national freedom is analogous to individual freedom, it is not the same; and the striving for the first has not always enhanced the second. It has sometimes led people to prefer a despot of their own race to the liberal government of an alien majority.” — Friedrich Hayek

“Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities it provides for unforeseen and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom.” — Friedrich 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 Hayek

“Socialism so long as it remains theoretical is internationalist, while as soon as it is put into practice, whether in Russia or in Germany, it becomes violently nationalist.” — Friedrich Hayek

“What you regard as specially advanced opinions are just the opinions dominant in your particular generation, and it requires much greater strength and independence of mind to take a critical view of what you have been taught to be progressive than merely to accept them.”

“It is a common mistake to regard National Socialism as a mere revolt against reason, an irrational movement without intellectual background. If that were so, the movement would be much less dangerous than it is.” — Friedrich Hayek

“From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently.” — Friedrich Hayek