Friedrich Hayek Quotes

Roger Williams... successfully vindicated the right of private judgment in matters of conscience, and effected a moral and political revolution in all governments of the civilized world.

I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws but to repeal them.

I too am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my particular hometown.

I think that every moment you succumb to cynicism, you're taking energy away from change.

Freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things.

The 21st century will not be about the battle between capitalism and socialism but between the forces of progress and the forces of conservatism.

Under democracy, individual liberty of opinion and action is jealously guarded.

We have conferred a mystic popularity upon officials whose only virtue is their timidity; while our scorn of rebels and reformers is so great that we have ceased to persecute them. The capitals and governments of the world are in the hands of caution; and change comes over them only in the night, unseen.

Liberty cannot be sacrificed for the sake of anything.

A man's liberties are none the less aggressed upon because those who coerce him do so in the belief that he will be benefited.

The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom...

The role of the federal government is to protect our liberties. That means they should protect our religious liberties to do what we want; our intellectual liberty, but it also should protect our right to do to our body what we want, you know, what we take into our bodies.

Being a conservative also used to involve the concept of people being free to do whatever they want to do, as long as it doesn't hurt somebody else. Conservatives used to be very libertarian.

[Freedom] is the greatest of political goods. I do not say freedom is the greatest of all goods: the best things come from within they are such things as creative art, and love, and thought. Such things can be helped or hindered by political conditions, but not actually produced by them; and freedom is, both in itself and in its relation to these other goods the best thing that political and economic conditions can secure.

Start your own revolution, cut out the middleman In a perfect world we'd all sing in tune But this is reality so give me some room So join the struggle while you may The Revolution is just a t-shirt away

I think the greatest legacy of the 1960s was the general feeling that not only can you fight the powers that be, but you can win.

If people were silent, nothing would change.

People need to dance. I'd say dance at least twice a day. That's how to get your energy up and how you keep you revolutionary spirit going. It's Emma Goldman who said, "Any revolution where I can't dance is not my revolution." I think that's the revolution we want.

Freedom is always in danger, and the majority of mankind will always acquiesce in its loss, unless a minority is willing to challenge the privileges of its few and the apathy of the masses.

Resistance to improvement contradicts the noblest instincts of the race. It begets its opposite. The fanaticism of reform is only the raging of the accumulated waters caused by the obstructions which an ultra conservatism has thrown across the stream of progress; and revolution itself is but the sudden overwhelming and sweeping away of impediments that should have been seasonably removed.

We hold that the Constitution does not forbid the states minor intrusions into an individual's body under stringently limited conditions.

It is liberalism, whether people like it or not, which has animated all the years of my life. What on Earth did conservatism ever accomplish for our country?

I don't conjure up ways of denying people freedom. I don't sit around and examine what people do that I don't like and try to figure out ways to get them to stop it, unless we're talking about lawbreakers, of course. But I'm a freedom, liberty, live and let live kind of guy. I might not approve of or like what people do, but have at it.

I am a member of a party of one, and I live in an age of fear. Nothing lately has unsettled my party and raised my fears as much as your editorial, on Thanksgiving Day, suggesting that employees should be required to state their beliefs in order to hold their jobs. The idea is inconsistent with our constitutional theory and has been stubbornly opposed by watchful men since the early days of the Republic.

Freedom. I will not give you up.