Friedrich Hayek

The chief evil is unlimited government…nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power.

Economic control…is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served.

Individual liberty…demonstrate[s] that some manners of living are more successful than others.

The case for individual freedom rests largely upon the recognition of the inevitable and universal ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievements of our ends and welfare depend.

The system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.

The argument for liberty is…an argument…against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.

Every wall is a door.

An awareness of our past is essential to the establishment of our personality and our identity as Africans.

He who has begun has half done. Dare to be wise; begin.

The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails – aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter’s reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail.

A toddling little girl is a center of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.

A mere literary man is a dull man; a man who is solely a man of business is a selfish man; but when literature and commerce are united, they make a respectable man.

It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.

The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.

Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

Man is God’s highest present development. He is the latest thing in God.

No matter how hard the past is, we can always begin again.