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There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. While the first is the condition of a free society, the second means as De Tocqueville describes it, 'a new form of servitude.'

— Friedrich Hayek

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Equality

More quotes by Friedrich Hayek

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)

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Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.

Mikhail Bakunin The Red Association (1870)

The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both.

Milton Friedman

It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.

Felix Frankfurter

It is not true that equality is a law of nature. nature has made nothing equal, her sovereign law is subordination and dependence.

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues Reflections and Maxims (1746)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Friedrich Hayek (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.