Friedrich Hayek

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.

Under the Rule of Law…the individual is free to pursue his personal ends and desires, certain that the powers of government will not be used deliberately to frustrate his efforts.

Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences…Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.

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

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

It is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.

I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.

We are well aware from which countries and through which countries the terrorists are receiving support. In the immediate future I shall be calling upon the leaders of these states to put a stop to this kind of activity.

Attention, must be devoted principally to raising the workers to the level of revolutionaries; it is not our task to descend to the level of the ‘working masses’.

Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War Two. We have everything we need except political will, but political will is a renewable resource.

The difference between a good govt. system and its poor administration is easily explained; the chief administrators are not Bosses in the best sense.

My notion of the KGB came from romantic spy stories. I was a pure and utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education.

Without perestroika, the cold war simply would not have ended. But the world could not continue developing as it had, with the stark menace of nuclear war ever present.

I think that the centralisation of access to information through the few major corporations that by now virtually monopolise information transmission, like Facebook, Google, Amazon, is extremely dangerous.

The commentators of 1963 speak, in discussing Africa, of the Monrovia States, the Brazzaville Group, the Casablanca Powers, of these and many more. Let us put an end to these terms. What we require is a single African organisation through which Africa’s single voice may be heard, within which Africa’s problems may be studied and resolved.

It’s very important for institutions of concentrated power to keep people alone and isolated: that way they’re ineffective, they can’t defend themselves against indoctrination, they can’t even figure out what they think.

In line with international law, only the U.N. Security Council could sanction the use of force against a sovereign state. Any other pretext or method which might be used to justify the use of force against an independent sovereign state are inadmissible and can only be interpreted as an aggression.

The disappearance of the Soviet Union is one of a number of factors that had the effect of essentially eliminating Third World voices. As long as [it] was there, two big gangsters parading around, there was some space for independent forces, there was room for non-alignment.

Too bad the only people who know how to run the country are busy driving cabs and cutting hair.

In France, to break the powerful labor movement, the US occupying forces needed strikebreakers and, more generally, goons. They reconstituted the Corsican Mafia for that purpose and, in payment, allowed them to restore the old heroin connection based in Marseilles…

I can only go one way. I’ve not got a reverse gear.