Friedrich Hayek Quotes

Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from birth what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government to do good.

A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.

No American conservative has ever argued that the government should never be involved in peoples' lives. That is anarchy, and we don't argue for that.

Liberalism isn't change. It has to be imposed.

Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable ... People have always preferred strong government to weak government, although they certainly have no liking for anything that smacks of overly intrusive government.

If, for example, existing government intervention is minor, we shall attach a smaller weight to the negative effect of additional government intervention. This is an important reason why many earlier liberals, like Henry Simons, writing at a time when government was small by today's standards, were willing to have government undertake activities that today's liberals would not accept now that government has become so overgrown.

The more people that understand and are made able to spot liberalism, and then the more people are able to associate liberalism with the problems in their lives, the political problems, the economic problems, the more people can be conditioned and educated to understand that liberalism is the problem, coupled with the ability to spot it, would be the fastest way to eradicate it. It would be really helpful if we had a Republican Party engaged in this.

Conservatives believe government's principal functions are the preservation of freedom and removal of restraints on the individual. Liberalism's ascent in the first two-thirds of this century reflected the new belief that government should also confer capacities on individuals. Liberalism's decline in the final third of this century has reflected doubts about whether government can be good at that, or whether government that is good at that is good for the nation's character.

I'm a Democrat, and there are an important group of things only the government can do. But let us be clear that for most of the world, what they most need is less government.

Progressivism was a sister movement of fascism, and today's liberalism is the daughter of Progressivism.

Big-government liberals don't like people with a sense of independence because independent people don't need big government.

Liberalism is dead, so dead that Democrats have all become moderate Republicans, and the heavy hand of Big Government is now limp and damp and trembly.

The left don't get what they want without the government forcing people to do it is the bottom line.

It's not just modern-day society that is liberal.

That is [liberalism's] goal - to destroy the family... [liberals] just made up this gay marriage thing gays are natural conservatives.

You know, if government were a product, selling it would be illegal. Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.

My contact with [Cato] was strange. They're ideologues, like Trotskyites. All questions must be seen and solved within the true faith of libertarianism, the idea of minimal government. And like Trotskyites, the guys from Cato can talk you to death.

Libertarian presidential candidate André Marrou's idea is that "government power is opposed to individual liberty." Must we still debate such sophomoric notions?... Besides, liberty, although very important, is not the only value.

[Libertarianism] is about curbing state power to let people be and do what they want. Liberalism is about using state power to make people do and be what liberals want. And that makes all the difference in the world.

Conservatism defends those coercive arrangements which a still-lingering savageness makes requisite. Radicalism endeavours to realize a state more in harmony with the character of the ideal man.

The believing mind reaches its perihelion in the so-called Liberals. They believe in each and every quack who sets up his booth inthe fairgrounds, including the Communists. The Communists have some talents too, but they always fall short of believing in the Liberals.

Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry.

The more that happens that makes sure liberals and liberalism remain a minority, the better off the world is gonna be and the better off this country is gonna be.

The scope of modern government in what it can and ought to accomplish for its people has been widened far beyond the principles laid down by the old "laissez faire" school of political rights, and the widening has met popular approval.

Everyone is a liberal until they have something to conserve. Then they become a conservative.