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Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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This freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth.
-- Robert Earl Hayden		 
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 August von Hayek		 
To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
[T]hose who are willing to surrender their freedom for security have always demanded that if they give up their full freedom it should also be taken from those not prepared to do so.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
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.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently.  Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
The successful politician owes his power to the fact that he moves within the accepted framework of thought, that he thinks and talks conventionally. It would be almost a contradiction in terms for a politician to be a leader in the field of ideas. His task in a democracy is to find out what the opinions held by the largest number are, not to give currency to new opinions which may become the majority view in some distant future.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
Even more significant of the inherent weakness of the collectivist theories is the extraordinary paradox that from the assertion that society is in some sense more than merely the aggregate of all individuals their adherents regularly pass by a sort of intellectual somersault to the thesis that in order that the coherence of this larger entity be safeguarded it must be subjected to conscious control, that is, to the control of what in the last resort must be an individual mind. It thus comes about that in practice it is regularly the theoretical collectivist who extols individual reason and demands that all forces of society be made subject to the direction of a single mastermind, while it is the individualist who recognizes the limitations of the powers of individual reason and consequently advocates freedom as a means for the fullest development of the powers of the interindividual process.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
Capitalism is not only a better form of organizing human activity than any deliberate design, any attempt to organize it to satisfy particular preferences, to aim at what people regard as beautiful or pleasant order, but it is also the indispensable condition for just keeping that population alive which exists already in the world. I regard the preservation of what is known as the capitalist system, of the system of free markets and the private ownership of the means of production, as an essential condition of the very survival of mankind.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
The greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
But after war [WW II] broke out I felt that this widespread misunderstanding of the political systems of our enemies, and soon also our new ally, Russia, constituted a serious danger which had to be met by a more systematic effort. Also, it was already fairly obvious that England herself was likely to experiment after the war with the same kind of policies which I was convinced had contributed so much to destroy liberty elsewhere. ... Opinion moves fast in the United States, and even now it is difficult to remember how comparatively short a time it was before The Road to Serfdom appeared that the most extreme kind of economic planning had been seriously advocated and the model of Russia held up for imitation by men who were soon to play an important role in public affairs. ... Be it enough to mention that in 1934 the newly established National Planning Board devoted a good deal of attention to the example of planning provided by these four countries: Germany, Italy, Russia, and Japan.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
It used to be the boast of free men that, so long as they kept within the bounds of the known law, there was no need to ask anybody's permission or to obey anybody's orders. It is doubtful whether any of us can make this claim today.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that which the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
...the case for individual freedom rests largely on 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.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
It is largely because civilization enables us constantly to profit from knowledge which we individually do not possess and because each individual's use of his particular knowledge may serve to assist others unknown to him in achieving their ends that men as members of civilized society can pursue their individual ends so much more successfully than they could alone.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
There can be no doubt that besides the regular types of the circulating medium, such as coin, notes and bank deposits, which are generally recognised to be money or currency, and the quantity of which is regulated by some central authority or can at least be imagined to be so regulated, there exist still other forms of media of exchange which occasionally or permanently do the service of money. Now while for certain practical purposes we are accustomed to distinguish these forms of media of exchange from money proper as being mere substitutes for money, it is clear that, other things equal, any increase or decrease of these money substitutes will have exactly the same effects as an increase or decrease of the quantity of money proper, and should therefore, for the purposes of theoretical analysis, be counted as money.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
[The] impersonal process of the market ... can be neither just nor unjust, because the results are not intended or foreseen.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
Many of the greatest things man has achieved are not the result of consciously directed thought, and still less the product of a deliberately coordinated effort of many individuals, but of a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
Unlike the rationalism of the French Revolution, true liberalism has no quarrel with religion, and I can only deplore the militant and essentially illiberal antireligionism which animated so much of nineteenth-century Continental liberalism. ... What distinguishes the liberal from the conservative here is that, however profound his own spiritual beliefs, he will never regard himself as entitled to impose them on others and that for him the spiritual and the temporal are different spheres which ought not to be confused.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
[T]he power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest fonctionaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work? And who will deny that a world in which the wealthy are powerful is still a better world than one in which only the already powerful can acquire wealth?
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
With the exception only of the period of the gold standard, practically all governments of history have used their exclusive power to issue money to defraud and plunder the people.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
[I]t is not the source but the limitation of power which prevents it from being arbitrary.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
Ever since the beginning of modern science, the best minds have recognized that "the range of acknowledged ignorance will grow with the advance of science." Unfortunately, the popular effect of this scientific advance has been a belief, seemingly shared by many scientists, that the range of our ignorance is steadily diminishing and that we can therefore aim at more comprehensive and deliberate control of all human activities. It is for this reason that those intoxicated by the advance of knowledge so often become the enemies of freedom.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
The history of government management of money has, except for a few short happy periods, been one of incessant fraud and deception.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the "wrong" beliefs.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
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.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
Unlike liberalism, with its fundamental belief in the long-range power of ideas, conservatism is bound by the stock of ideas inherited at a given time. And since it does not really believe in the power of argument, its last resort is generally a claim to superior wisdom, based on some self-arrogated superior quality.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
It is only because the majority opinion will always be opposed by some that our knowledge and understanding progress. In the process by which opinion is formed, it is very probable that, by the time any view becomes a majority view, it is no longer the best view: somebody will already have advanced beyond the point which the majority have reached. It is because we do not yet know which of the many competing new opinions will prove itself the best that we wait until it has gained sufficient support.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
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 August von Hayek		 
Is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that, in our endeavour consciously to shape our future in accordance with high ideals, we should in fact unwittingly produce the very opposite of what we have been striving for?
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
By giving the government unlimited powers, the most arbitrary rule can be made legal; and in this way a democracy may set up the most complete despotism imaginable.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
To combat depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection -- a procedure which can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
The [classical] liberal, of course, does not deny that there are some superior people -- he is not an egalitarian -- but he denies that anyone has authority to decide who these superior people are.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
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 August von Hayek		 
In the United States, where it has become almost impossible to use "liberal" in the sense in which I have used it, the term "libertarian" has been used instead. It may be the answer; but for my part I find it singularly unattractive. For my taste it carries too much the flavor of a manufactured term and of a substitute. What I should want is a word which describes the party of life, the party that favors free growth and spontaneous evolution. But I have racked my brain unsuccessfully to find a descriptive term which commends itself.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
To create conditions in which competition will be as effective as possible, to prevent fraud and deception, to break up monopolies -- these tasks provide a wide and unquestioned field for state activity.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
The greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
Many who think themselves infinitely superior to the aberrations of Nazism, and sincerely hate all manifestations, work at the same time for ideals whose realization would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
...if we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
There is perhaps no single factor contributing so much to people's frequent reluctance to let the market work as their inability to conceive how some necessary balance, between demand and supply, between exports and imports, or the like, will be brought about without deliberate control. The conservative feels safe and content only if he is assured that some higher wisdom watches and supervises change, only if he knows that some authority is charged with keeping the change "orderly."
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
The authority of local government was similarly attacked. The not inconsiderable power of the Länder disappeared as a result of the decree of 28 February [1933] and the manipulated elections which followed. Control of the police passed into the hands of the NSDAP. ... Local elections were abolished and Reich Administrators ... were appointed to rule in place of the locally elected heads of government. On 30 January 1934 all local assemblies were abolished, and states were made totally subservient to central rule.
-- Paul Hayes		 
Unlike ordinary legislation, a constitution is enacted by the people themselves in their sovereign capacity and is therefore the paramount law.
-- Justice Frank Cruise Haymond		 
There have existed, in every age and every country, two distinct orders of men – the lovers of freedom and the devoted advocates of power.
-- Robert Y. Hayne		 
The root of the evil... lay not in corruption but in the system which bred it, the alliance between industrialists and politicians which produced benefits in the form of tariffs, public lands, and federal subsidies.
-- Samuel P. Hays		 
If you really want to compete with Russia and China to prevent the 21st Century from being dominated by a new axis of evil, you must first defeat the Church of Global Warming. As long as that’s the official state religion of the Western world, we haven’t got a prayer.
-- John Hayward		 
Causes that live by politics, die by politics.
-- Steven F. Hayward		 
The monetary managers are fond of telling us that they have substituted 'responsible money management' for the gold standard. But there is no historic record of responsible paper money management ... The record taken as a whole is one of hyperinflation, devaluation and monetary chaos.
-- Henry Hazlitt		 
The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects - his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity.
-- Henry Hazlitt		 
The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.
-- William Hazlitt		 
The only vice that can not be forgiven is hypocrisy.
-- William Hazlitt		 
Prejudice is the child of ignorance.
-- William Hazlitt		 
The most fluent talkers or the most plausible reasoners are not always the justest thinkers.
-- William Hazlitt		 
Marihuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men's shadows and look at a white woman twice.
-- Hearst newspapers nationwide		 
We hold that the greatest right in the world is the right to be wrong, that in the exercise thereof people have an inviolable right to express their unbridled thoughts on all topics and personalities, being liable only for the use of that right.
-- William Randolph Hearst		 
Any man who has the brains to think and the nerve to act for the benefit of the people of the country is considered a radical by those who are content with stagnation and willing to endure disaster.
-- William Randolph Hearst		 
We hold that no person or set of persons can properly establish a standard of expression for others.
-- William Randolph Hearst		 
When free discussion is denied, hardening of the arteries of democracy has set in, free institutions are but a lifeless form, and the death of the republic is at hand.
-- William Randolph Hearst		 
Fraud may consist as well in the suppression of what is true as in the representation of what is false. If a man professing to answer a question, select those facts only which are likely to give a credit to the person of whom he speaks, and keep back the rest, he is a more artful knave than he who tells a direct falsehood.
-- Justice Heath		 
We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy.
-- Chris Hedges		 
This is, in theory, still a free country, but our politically correct, censorious times are such that many of us tremble to give vent to perfectly acceptable views for fear of condemnation. Freedom of speech is thereby imperiled, big questions go undebated, and great lies become accepted, unequivocally as great truths.
-- Simon Heffer		 
When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength.
-- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel		 
The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.
-- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel		 
Freedom is the fundamental character of the will, as weight is of matter... That which is free is the will. Will without freedom is an empty word.
-- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel		 
What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
-- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel		 
The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.
-- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel		 
The present homeschooling laws are, at best, a poor compromise between a highly structured, two hundred billion dollar a year industry and the principles and beliefs of a handful of parents.
-- Helen Hegener		 
Our tightly controlled educational system mocks the promise of democracy. With a closed educational system we simply cannot have an open political system. The current situation allows the government and big business to manufacture and maintain our culture for us, and in turn, control remains in the hands of the experts and institutions. The ability to change this situation is in the hands of the individuals and families who understand why change is necessary.
-- Helen Hegener		 
All special charters of freedom must be abrogated where the universal law of freedom is to flourish.
-- Heinrich Heine		 
Whenever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.
-- Heinrich Heine		 
Whenever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.
-- Heinrich Heine		 
Freedom is a new religion, the religion of our time.
-- Heinrich Heine		 
The same fact that Boccaccio offers in support of religion might be adduced in behalf of a republic: "It exists in spite of its ministers."
-- Heinrich Heine		 
You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once.
-- Robert A. Heinlein		 
The great trouble with religion – any religion – is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak uncertainty of reason – but one cannot have both.
-- Robert A. Heinlein		 
There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.
-- Robert A. Heinlein		 
I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
-- Robert A. Heinlein		 
Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Nations and peoples who forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.
-- Robert A. Heinlein		 
Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.
-- Robert A. Heinlein		 
The human race divides itself politically into those who want to be controlled, and those who have no such desire.
-- Robert A. Heinlein		 
An armed society is a polite society.
-- Robert A. Heinlein		 
Place your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.
-- Robert A. Heinlein		 
Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor.
-- Robert A. Heinlein		 
[T]here seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously—after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important ... so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth.
-- Robert A. Heinlein		 
The whole principle is wrong. It’s like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.
-- Robert A. Heinlein		 
Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.
-- Robert A. Heinlein		 
In a society in which it is a moral offense to be different from your neighbor your only escape is to never let them find out.
-- Robert A. Heinlein		 
Goodness without wisdom always accomplished evil.
-- Robert A. Heinlein		 


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