68 quotes
We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage.
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988)
What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.
The Constitution of Liberty (1960)
The more the state "plans" the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.
The Road to Serfdom (1944)
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 Constitution of Liberty (1960)
No human mind can comprehend all the knowledge which guides the actions of society.
Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom.
The Constitution of Liberty (1960)
"Emergencies" have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.
Once wide coercive powers are given to governmental agencies for particular purposes, such powers cannot be effectively controlled by democratic assemblies.
A society that does not recognize 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.
The Constitution of Liberty (1960)
Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988)
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.
It is no exaggeration to say that the central aim of socialism is to discredit those traditional morals which keep us alive.
The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before the law.
The Constitution of Liberty (1960)
It is when it is contended that "in a democracy right is what the majority makes it to be" that democracy degenerates into demagoguery.
The Constitution of Liberty (1960)
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
Economic Freedom and Representative Government (1973)
Our moral traditions, like many other aspects of our culture, developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product.
The Fatal Conceit (1988)
Our morality itself is the result of a process of cultural selection. Those things survive which enable the species to multiply.
The advice I would give is: If you have the courage to do so, don't feel patriotic in monetary matters. Choose the money which helps you best.
I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it.
Nobel Banquet Speech (1974)