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Friedrich Hayek

94 quotes

“All economic activity is carried out through time. Every individual economic process occupies a certain time, and all linkages between economic processes necessarily involve longer or shorter periods of time.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1928 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Intertemporal Price Equilibrium and Movement in the Value of Money" (1928)
“The attack on economics sprang rather from a dislike of the application of scientific methods to the investigation of social problems. The existence of a body of reasoning which prevented people from following their first impulsive reactions, and which compelled them to balance indirect effects, which could be seen only by exercising the intellect, against intense feeling caused by the direct observation of concrete suffering, then as now, occasioned intense resentment.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1933 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Trend of Economic Thinking", lecture delivered at LSE on March 1, 1933, published in Economica (May 1933)
“The treatment of the South Tirolese by the Italians, even before the advent of Fascism worse than anything known until then in modern times in any part of Western or Central Europe, has made the population more unwilling than ever to endure it further.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Protesting against the Allies' decision to hand South Tyrol back to Italy; letter to The Times (22 December 1945), p. 5
“Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic and power adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desirable if this world is to become a better place.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The more the state "plans" the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The mechanism by which the interaction of democratic decisions and their implementation by the experts often produces results which nobody has desired is a subject which would deserve much more careful attention than it usually receives.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yet, though the French Revolution was so largely inspired by the ideal of the Rule of Law, it is questionable whether it really helped the advance towards that ideal. In its course too many different aspirations gained influence which it was difficult to reconcile with that ideal.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe that the main lesson which our generation has learnt is that 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. The whole purpose of these lectures has been to suggest that we can find such a limit if we are willing to revive and develop the ancient ideal of the Rule of Law.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1899–1992) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Principles or Expediency?” Toward Liberty: Essays in Honor of Ludwig von Mises on the Occasion of his 90th Birthday (29 September 1971)
“Perhaps I'm unrealistic. As long as people do not fully realize the danger of inflation, they may well pressure for more inflation as a short-term remedy for evils. Though we may well be driven into more, until people have learned the lesson, but that means that inflation may still do more of a great deal of harm, before it will be cured.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview on "Meet the Press" (22 June 1975)
“May one who has devoted a large part of his life to the study of the history and the principles of liberalism point out that a party that keeps a socialist government in power clearly has lost all title to the name “Liberal”. Certainly no liberal can in future vote “Liberal”.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the Lib–Lab pact; letter to The Times (31 March 1977), p. 15
“When will the British public at last learn to understand that there is no salvation for Britain until the special privileges granted to the trade unions by the Trade Disputes Act 1906 are revoked? ... There can indeed be little doubt to a detached observer that the privileges then granted to the trade unions have become the chief source of Britain's economic decline.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to The Times (21 July 1977), p. 15
“What is at issue is not union membership but compulsory union membership and not the right to strike but the right to compel others to strike. There is no need for any other explanation of why the British economy is decaying and the German highly prosperous. The trade unions, being politically sacrosanct, have been allowed to destroy the British economy, and since even somebody as sympathetic to labour as Lady Wootton has told us that “it is in fact the business of a union to be anti-social”, it is high time that somebody had the courage to eradicate that cancer of the British economy.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter (28 July 1977) printed in The Times (2 August 1977), p. 11
“The next time I met Ludwig Wittgenstein was in the spring of 1928 when the economist Dennis Robertson, who was taking me for a walk through the Fellows' Gardens of Trinity College, Cambridge, suddenly decided to change course because on the top of a little rise he perceived the form of the philosopher draped over a deckchair. He evidently stood rather in awe of him, and he did not wish to disturb him.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Remembering My Cousin, Ludwig Wittgenstein", Encounter (August 1977). Page 21.
“There can be no doubt that our innate moral emotions and instincts were acquired in the hundreds of thousand years—probably half a million years—in which Homo sapiens lived in small hunting and gathering groups and developed a physiological constitution which governed his innate instincts. These instincts are still very strong in us. Yet civilization developed by our gradually learning cultural rules which were transmitted by teaching and which served largely to restrain and suppress some of those natural instincts.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Conversation at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, D.C. (9 February 1978); published in [A Conversation with Friedrich A. Von Hayek: Science and Socialism (1979)
“Nobody who has lived through the rise of the violent anti-Semitism which led to Hitler can refuse Mrs. Thatcher admiration for her courageous and outspoken warning. When I grew up in Vienna the established Jewish families were a generally respected group and all decent people would frown upon the occasional anti-Jewish outbursts of a few popular politicians. It was the sudden influx of large numbers of Galician and Polish Jews [during World War I] … which in a short period changed the attitude. They were too visibly different to be readily absorbed.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to The Times after Thatcher claimed that British people were afraid of being "swamped" by people of a different culture. (11 February 1978), p. 15
“She was a very good-looking woman, and extremely intelligent. But she wasn’t really very female; she had too much of a male intelligence.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Conversation with Alchian (1978); About , published in Nobel Prize-Winning Economist: Friedrich A. von Hayek (1983), p. 363
“It seems to me more and more that the immense efforts which during the great popularity of macroeconomics over the last thirty or forty years have been devoted to it, were largely misspent, and that if we want to be useful in the future we shall have to be content to improve and spread the admittedly limited insights which microeconomics conveys.I believe it is only microeconomics which enables us to understand the crucial functions of the market process: that it enables us to make effective use of information about thousands of facts of which nobody can have full knowledge.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Coping with Ignorance," The Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture, Originally published in Imprimis 7 (Hillsdale, Michigan: Hillsdale College, July 1978). Later reprinted in Cheryl A. Yurchis (ed.) Champions of Freedom (The…
“What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change. It has, since the French Revolution, for a century and a half played an important role in European politics. Until the rise of socialism its opposite was liberalism... There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because 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 (1899–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be a wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the Great Society in which the individual no longer has specific claims on the members of the particular small group into which he was born.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Law, Legislation and Liberty, volume 3, chapter 3, p. 55 (1979)
“I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I feared that such a prize, as I believe is true of the activities of some of the great scientific foundations, would tend to accentuate the swings of scientific fashion. This apprehension the selection committee has brilliantly refuted by awarding the prize to one whose views are as unfashionable as mine are.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no doubt, and in this I agree with Milton Friedman, that once the Crash had occurred, the Federal Reserve System pursued a silly deflationary policy. I am not only against inflation but I am also against deflation! So, once again, a badly programmed monetary policy prolonged the depression! So, once again, a badly programmed monetary policy prolonged the depression. One consequence of this policy was, of course, the fact that confidence was destroyed.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The knowledge of facts is widely dispersed. We want to make use of knowledge possessed by millions of individual people, which they can only use if they are fed signals about the general situation. You can't reverse it you can't possibly concentrate this knowledge. The whole order of international cooperation has been built on such a signalling system, where signals tell you about facts which nobody knows concrete in their totality, and I may add such signals you cannot correct - you can not correct signals which inform you about circumstances you don't know.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: in The Levin interviews - Friedrich Hayek (31st May 1980)
“I don’t believe we’re in for a crash now. It's much more likely that government will just conceal the continuation of inflation by price controls. But if anything is worse than an open inflation, it’s a repressed inflation. What you’re likely to get is not a violent deflation but increasing stagnation of productivity.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview in Silver & Gold Report, Vol. V, No. 20, (Late October 1980)
“If the world as a whole returned to the gold standard there would be such fluctuations in the value of gold that it would very soon prove impractical. Today an international gold standard could only mean that a few countries would maintain a real gold standard. The other countries would hang on to the system through a gold exchange standard — where the currency isn't really redeemable in gold but the government attempts to keep a fixed rate between its currency and gold.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview in Silver & Gold Report, Vol. V, No. 20, (Late October 1980)
“If a big country like the United States did return to the gold standard, it would start a great deflation. Most likely the government couldn't stick to it for long. They'd switch the policy to some halfway measure like a gold exchange standard.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview in Silver & Gold Report, Vol. V, No. 20, (Late October 1980)
“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.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview in Silver & Gold Report, Vol. V, No. 20, (Late October 1980)
“When I look at the world, I sometimes feel that here in Germany one may still be in some sort of lifeboat that can hope to keep afloat when the rest of the world goes bust. German and Switzerland and perhaps Austria and Belgium have the few relatively stable currencies in the world.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview in Silver & Gold Report, Vol. V, No. 20, (Late October 1980)
“There is no salvation for Britain unless the special privileges granted to the trade unions in 1906 are revoked. The average level of real wages of British workers would undoubtedly be higher, and their chances of finding employment better, if the wages of different occupations were again determined by the market and all limitations on the work an individual is allowed to do were removed.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Trade Unions — The Biggest Obstacle", Economic Affairs (October 1980)
“The illiterate expression ‘given data’ constantly recurs in Lange. It appears to have an irresistable attraction to mathematical economists because it doubly assures them that they know what they do not know. It seems to bewitch them into making assertions about the real world for which they have no empirical justification whatever.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Two Pages of Fiction: The Impossibility of Socialist Calculation", Economic Affairs (1982)
“What the planning authority would have to know would not be the mere totals but the distinct, peculiar conditions prevailing in each enterprise which affect the information about values transmitted through market prices but would be completely lost in any statistical information about quantities that might reach the authority from time to time.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Two Pages of Fiction: The Impossibility of Socialist Calculation", Economic Affairs (1982)
“There mere idea that the planning authority could ever possess a complete inventory of the amounts and qualities of all the different materials and instruments of production of which the manager of a particular plant will know or be able to find out makes the whole proposal a somewhat comic fiction. Once this is recognised it becomes obvious that what prices ought to be can never be determined without relying on competitive markets.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Two Pages of Fiction: The Impossibility of Socialist Calculation", Economic Affairs (1982)
“A reconsideration of the discussion in which I took an active part more than 40 years ago has left me with a rather depressing view of the somewhat shameful state of what has become an established part of economic science, the subject of 'economic systems'. It appears to me that in this subject political attractiveness has been preserved by the flimsiest of arguments. The kindest thing one can say is that some well-meaning people have allowed themselves to be deceived by the vague and thoughtless language commonly used by specialists in the theory of these issues.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Two Pages of Fiction: The Impossibility of Socialist Calculation", Economic Affairs (1982)
“These morals, or better this moral tradition, is the result of an evolution which occurred parallel to, and yet distinct from both biological evolution on the one hand, and the evolution of our intellect on the other hand.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Individual and Collective Aims", delivered on 12 March 1982, published in Susan Mendus, David Edwards (ed.) On Toleration (1987)
“On the scale on which [tax cutting] is being tried, I'm a little apprehensive. I'm all for reduction of government expenditures but to anticipate it by reducing the rate of taxation before you have reduced expenditure is a very risky thing to do.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: in "Business People; A Nobel Winner Assesses Reagan", The New York Times (1 December 1982)
“My life has been dominated by my differences with John Maynard Keynes. That turns almost wholly on the - I believe, false - conviction that there is a simple relationship between aggregate demand for consumer goods and the volume of employment. Keynes was one of the most intelligent people I knew but he understood very little economics. He must not be blamed for his disciples. He knew the danger of inflation.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: in "Business People; A Nobel Winner Assesses Reagan", The New York Times (1 December 1982)
“[Milton Friedman] believes in an oversimplified quantitative relationship between a measurable quantity of money and the price level. You must leave it to the discretion of the central bank to so adjust the supply of ultimate cash reserves as to keep the price level stable.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: in "Business People; A Nobel Winner Assesses Reagan", The New York Times (1 December 1982)
“We have found a method of creating an order of human co–operation which far exceeds the limits of our knowledge. We are led to do things by circumstances of which we are largely unaware. We do not know the needs which we satisfy, nor do we know the sources of the things which we get. We stand in an enormous framework into which we fit ourselves by obeying certain rules of conduct that we have never made and never understood, but which have their reason.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Our Moral Heritage", The Heritage Lectures (1983)
“We do not owe our morals to our intelligence: we owe them to the fact that some groups uncomprehendingly accepted certain rules of conduct — the rules of private property, of honesty, and of the family — that enabled the groups practising them to prosper, multiply, and gradually to displace the others.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Our Moral Heritage", The Heritage Lectures (1983)
“Our morality itself is the result of a process of cultural selection. Those things survive which enable the species to multiply.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Our Moral Heritage", The Heritage Lectures (1983)
“In a sense, we all are socialists. We are still governed by feelings that are based on what was necessary in the small group of known people among whom each had to aim at fulfilling the needs of persons he knew; where he had to collaborate with a definite group of fellows, who were given to him and whom he could not choose, to pursue common purposes. Our instincts still tell us to strive to serve the known needs of known people and that our pleasure in life is derived from the consciousness that we follow a set of common purposes with people whom we know and who share our environment.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Reactionary Character of the Socialist Conception", published in Knowledge, Evolution, and Society (1983)
“The human groups have been selected for the effects of their habitual practices, effects of which the individuals were not and could not be aware. Customs are mostly group properties, beneficial only if they are common properties of its individual members but referring to reciprocal action. Morals have not only been designed by man, but man also usually does not understand their reason.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Origins and Effects of Our Morals: A Problem for Science", in The Essence of Hayek (1984)
“It is no exaggeration to say that the central aim of socialism is to discredit those traditional morals which keep us alive.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Origins and Effects of Our Morals: A Problem for Science", in The Essence of Hayek (1984)
“And since any inflation, however modest at first, can help employment only so long as it accelerates, adopted as a means of reducing unemployment, it will do so for any length of time only while it accelerates. "Mild" steady inflation cannot help—it can lead only to outright inflation. That inflation at a constant rate soon ceases to have any stimulating effect, and in the end merely leaves us with a backlog of delayed adaptations, is the conclusive argument against the "mild" inflation represented as beneficial even in standard economics textbooks.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1980s Unemployment and the Unions: Essays on the Impotent Price Structure of Britain and Monopoly in the Labour Market (1984)
“I don't like criticizing Milton Friedman not only because he is an old friend but because, outside of monetary theory, we are in complete agreement. Our general views on what is desired and what is not are almost identical until we get on to money. But if I told him what I said before, that I very much doubt whether monetary policy has ever done anything good, he would disagree. He personally is convinced that a good monetary policy is a foundation for everything.”
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with James U. Blanchard III, in Cato Policy Report (May/June 1984))