Quotes from The Constitution of Liberty

By F.A. Hayek (1960)

The fundamental absurdity of a majority taxing itself in order to maintain a propaganda organization aimed at persuading the same majority to go further than it is yet willing should be obvious.#
Politics Democracy
The main lesson of the period of Confederation was that the mere writing-down on paper of a constitution changed little unless explicit machinery was provided to enforce it.#
Politics Law
Though the concept of national freedom is analogous to that of individual freedom, it is not the same; and the striving for the first has not always enhanced the second.#
Law Politics
The decisive factor which made the efforts of the [French] Revolution toward the enhancement of individual liberty so abortive was that it created the belief that, since at last all power had been placed in the hands of the people, all safeguards against the abuse of this power had become unnecessary.#
Democracy Politics History
A free society demands not only that the government have the monopoly of coercion but that it have the monopoly only of coercion.#
Law Politics
A free system can adapt itself to almost any set of data, almost any general prohibition or regulation, so long as the adjusting mechanism itself is kept functioning.#
Economics
There are strong reasons why action by local authorities generally offers the next-best solution where private initiative cannot be relied upon to provide certain services and where some sort of collective action is therefore needed; for it has many of the advantages of private enterprise and fewer of the dangers of the coercive action of government. Competition between local authorities or between larger units within an area where there is freedom of movement provides in a large measure that opportunity for experimentation with alternative methods which will secure most of the advantages of free growth.#
Politics
Monopoly is certainly undesirable, but only in the same sense in which scarcity is undesirable; in neither case does this mean that we can avoid it. It is one of the unpleasant facts of life that certain capacities (and also certain advantages and traditions of particular organizations) cannot be duplicated, as it is a fact that certain goods are scarce.#
Proverb Economics
The law cannot effectively prohibit states of affairs but only kinds of action.#
Law
Because unions are most powerful where capital investments are heaviest, they tend to become a deterrent to investment – at present probably second only to taxation.#
Tax Economics Politics Capital
The dominant “full-employment” doctrines explicitly relieve the unions of the responsibility for any unemployment and place the duty of preserving full employment on the monetary and fiscal authorities.#
Economics Politics
To the impatient reformer, who will be satisfied with nothing short of the immediate abolition of all avoidable evils, the creation of a single apparatus with full powers to do what can be done now appears therefore as the only appropriate method. In the long run, however . . . we may well prevent the evolution of other organizations whose eventual contribution to welfare might have been greater.#
Politics
Though all insurance involves a pooling of risks, private competitive insurance can never effect a deliberate transfer of income from one previously designated group of people to another.#
Politics
The reason why a division of powers between different authorities always reduces the power that anybody can exercise . . . is not merely that the separate authorities will, through mutual jealousy, prevent one another from exceeding their authority. More important is the fact that certain kinds of coercion require the joint and coordinated use of different powers or the employment of several means, and, if these means are in separate hands, nobody can exercise those kinds of coercion.#
Politics
While the task of combating the serious diseases which befall and disable some in manhood is a relatively limited one, the task of slowing down the chronic processes which must bring about the ultimate decay of all of us is unlimited. The latter presents a problem which can, under no conceivable condition, be solved by an unlimited provision of medical facilities and which, therefore, must continue to present a painful choice between competing aims.#
Politics Economics
We must not overlook the fact that the market has, on the whole, guided the evolution of cities more successfully, though imperfectly, than is commonly realized and that most of the proposals to improve upon this, not by making it work better, but by superimposing a system of central direction, show little awareness of what such a system would have to accomplish, even to equal the market in effectiveness.#
Economics Law
The housing problem is not an independent problem which can be solved in isolation: it is part of the general problem of poverty and can be solved only by a general rise in incomes.#
Economics Development
We should be showing more respect for the dignity of man if we allowed certain ways of life to disappear altogether instead of preserving them as specimens of a past age.#
Culture Ethics
It may be better even that some children should go without formal education than that they should be killed in fighting over who is to control that education.#
Education Politics
Since the chief contribution of any individual is to make the best use of the accidents he encounters, success must to a great extent be a matter of chance.#
Economics
To live and work successfully with others requires more than faithfulness to one’s concrete aims. It requires an intellectual commitment to a type of order in which, even on issues which to one are fundamental, others are allowed to pursue different ends.#
Culture
One of the strongest arguments against [the establishment of welfare programs] is that their introduction is the kind of politically irrevocable measure that will have to be continued, whether it proves a mistake or not.#
Politics
We have thus no choice but to submit to rules whose rationale we often do not know, and to do so whether or not we can see that anything important depends on their being observed in the particular instance. The rules of morals are instrumental in the sense that they assist mainly in the achievement of other human values; however, since we only rarely can know what depends on their being followed in the particular instance, to observe them must be regarded as a value in itself, a sort of intermediate end which we must pursue without questioning its justification in the particular case.#
Norms Ethics
Like all moral principles, [freedom] demands that it be accepted as a value in itself, as a principle that must be respected without our asking whether the consequences in the particular instance will be beneficial. We shall not achieve the results we want if we do not accept it as a creed or presumption so strong that no considerations of expediency can be allowed to limit it.#
Norms Ethics
To prevent progress at the top would soon prevent it all the way down.#
Development Economics
Once this identification of freedom with power is admitted, there is no limit to the sophisms by which the attractions of the word “liberty” can be used to support measures which destroy individual liberty.#
Law Politics
Coercion, however, cannot be altogether avoided because the only way to prevent it is by the threat of coercion.#
Law
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.#
Epistemology
The benefits I derive from freedom are thus largely the result of the uses of freedom by others.#
Culture Law
To turn the whole of society into a single organization built and directed according to a single plan would be to extinguish the very forces that shaped the individual human minds that planned it.#
Law Culture
It is misleading to think of those new possibilities as if they were, from the beginning, a common possession of society which its members could deliberately share; they become a common possession only through that slow process by which the achievements of the few are made available to the many.#
Culture Economics
A large part of the expenditure of the rich, though not intended for that end, thus serves to defray the cost of the experimentation with the new things that, as a result, can later be made available to the poor.#
Development Economics
As long as the graduation is more or less continuous and all the steps in the income pyramid are reasonably occupied, it can scarcely be denied that those lower down profit materially from the fact that others are ahead.#
Inequality Economics
The experience of the United States at least seems to indicate that, once the rise in the position of the lower classes gathers speed, catering to the rich ceases to be the main source of great gain and gives place to efforts directed toward the needs of the masses.#
Economics Development
The changes to which such people must submit are … an illustration of the fact that not only the mass of men but, strictly speaking, every human being is led by the growth of civilization into a path that is not of his own choosing.#
Culture Economics
We must not believe that, because we have learned to make laws deliberately, all laws must be deliberately made by some human agency.#
Law
That we ought not believe anything which has been shown to be false does not mean that we ought to believe only what has been demonstrated to be true.#
Epistemology
In order to make ourselves act rationally we often find it necessary to be guided by habit rather than reflection.#
Ethics Proverb
Where all are made to serve the same ideals and where dissenters are not allowed to follow different ones, the rules can be proved inexpedient only by the decline of the whole nation guided by them.#
Law Politics
It is nonsense to say, as is so often said, that “it is not a man’s fault that he is as he is,” for the aim of assigning responsibility is to make him different from what he is or might be. . . . We assign responsibility to a man, not in order to say that as he was he might have acted differently, but in order to make him different.#
Law
The assigning of responsibility does not involve the assertion of a fact. It is rather of the nature of a convention intended to make people observe certain rules.#
Law
Since we assign responsibility to the individual in order to influence his action, it should refer only to such effects of his conduct as it is humanly possible for him to foresee and to such as we can reasonably wish him to take into account in ordinary circumstances. To be effective, responsibility must be both definite and limited, adapted both emotionally and intellectually to human capacities.#
Law Ethics
If the result of individual liberty did not demonstrate that some manners of living are more successful than others, much of the case for it would vanish.#
Culture Law
If in the Western world universal adult suffrage seems the best arrangement, this does not prove that it is required by some basic principle.#
Democracy Politics
We certainly do not regard it as right that the citizens of a large country should dominate those of a small adjoining country merely because they are more numerous. There is as little reason why the majority of the people who have joined for some purposes, be it as a nation or some supranational organization, should be regarded as entitled to extend the scope of their power as far as they please. The current theory of democracy suffers from the fact that it is usually developed with some ideal homogenous community in view and then applied to the very imperfect and often arbitrary units which the existing states constitute.#
Democracy Politics
Once it is generally accepted that majority decisions can merely indicate ends and that the pursuit of them is to be left to the discretion of the administrators, it will soon be believed also that almost any means to achieve those ends are legitimate. The individual has little reason to fear any general laws which the majority may pass, but he has much reason to fear the rulers it may put over him to implement its directions.#
Democracy Politics
What later enabled those who did not inherit land and tools from their parents to survive and multiply was the fact that it became practicable and profitable for the wealthy to use their capital in such a way as to give employment to large numbers.#
Economics
One may share to the full the distaste for the ostentation, the bad taste, and the wastefulness of many of the new rich and yet recognize that, if we were to prevent all that we disliked, the unforeseen things that might be thus prevented would probably outweigh the bad.#
Aesthetics Politics
A constitutional system does not involve an absolute limitation of the will of the people but merely a subordination of immediate objectives to long-term ones. . . . It means that the agreement to submit to the will of the temporary majority on particular issues is based on the general understanding that this majority will abide by more general principles laid down beforehand by a more comprehensive body.#
Democracy Politics

A.N. Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle—they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.#
History Epistemology

Charles Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws (1748)

As in democracies the people seem to act almost as they please, this sort of government has been deemed the most free, and the power of the people has been confounded with their liberty.#
Politics Democracy

James Madison, “Federalist XLVII” (1788)

A mere demarcation on parchment of the constitutional limits of the several departments is not a sufficient guard against those encroachments which lead to a tyrannical concentration of all the powers of government in the same hands.#
Politics Law
The invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.#
Politics Democracy

Walter Lippmann, An inquiry into the principles of the Good Society (1937)

In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.#
Law Politics