“There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. While the first is the condition of a free society, the second means as De Tocqueville describes it, ‘a new form of servitude.’”
F. A. Hayek, “Individualism: True and False” (1945), in Individualism and Economic Order
“…I very much doubt whether monetary policy has ever done anything good….”
F. A. Hayek, Cato Policy Report, from an interview conducted by James U. Blanchard III
“The more the state ‘plans’ the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”
F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, Chapter 6, “Planning and the Rule of Law”
“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.”
F. A. Hayek, “Scientism and The Study of Society” (1944), p. 67; later published in The Counter-revolution of Science
“All economic activity is carried out through time. Every individual economic process occupies a certain time, and all linkages between economic processes necessarily involve longer or shorter periods of time.”
F. A. Hayek, “Intertemporal Price Equilibrium and Movement in the Value of Money” (1928)
“Never read any book that is not a year old.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “First Visit to England” in English Traits (1856)
“The thing done avails, and not what is said about it. An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “First Visit to England” in English Traits (1856)
“In contemplating the religious system of the Aztecs, one is struck with its apparent incongruity, as if some portion of it had emanated from a comparatively refined people, open to gentle influences, while the rest breathes a spirit of unmitigated ferocity.”
William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, chapter three
“All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don’t know by what you do; that’s what I called ‘guessing what was at the other side of the hill.’”
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington
“The civil state regarded purely as a lawful state, is based on the following a priori principles:
“These principles are not so much laws given by an already established state, as laws by which a state can alone be established in accordance with pure rational principles of external human right. ”
Immanuel Kant, Theory and Practice (1791)