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.
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
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.
A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.
Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.
In government, the scum rises to the top.
We must raise and train an army of fighters for freedom.
This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals.
I am certain, however, that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
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?
Conservatism is only as good as what it conserves.
It is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism.
The idea that human kind can shape the world according to wish is what I call the fatal conceit.
Few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and naziism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.
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.
I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it.
The mischievous idea that all public needs should be satisfied by compulsory organization and that all the means that individuals are willing to devote to pubic purposes should be under the control of government, is wholly alien to the basic principles of a free society.
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.
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.
The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess.