Friedrich Hayek Quotes

The man of the millennium is much more liberated than the man of the '90s.

Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.

There will always be men struggling to change, and there will always be those who are controlled by the past.

The ancient liberal faith ... that our course be governed not by the dead hand of yesterday's facts and prejudices but by the living realities of today and our aspiration for tomorrow. It is this genius for making change serve the eternal unchanging values we cherish that is the very essence of American liberalism.

Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe?

If there is anything that is important to America, it is that you are not a prisoner of the past.

If freedom makes social progress possible, so social progress strengthens and enlarges freedom. The two are inseparable partners in the great adventure of humanity.

The conservatives who say, "Let us not move so fast," and the extremists who say, "Let us go out and whip the world ," would tell you that they are as far apart as the poles. But there is a striking parallel: They accomplish nothing; for they do not reach the people who have a crying need to be free.

The future is meant for those who are willing to let go of the worst parts of the past. When you cannot take two steps without turning around to inspect your footsteps, you are getting nowhere fast.

Young people, especially young men due to culture and perhaps testosterone, dream about changing the world, making an impact, doing big things. Now our young people are told life was better in the past, that we should be less ambitious and hold on to what we have. The grand narratives of exploration and change that drove the world forward for a century have been tamed.

We shall some day be heeded, and when we shall have our amendment to the Constitution of the United States, everybody will think it was always so, just exactly as many young people believe that all the privileges, all the freedom, all the enjoyments which woman now possesses always were hers. They have no idea of how every single inch of ground that she stands upon today has been gained by the hard work of some little handful of women of the past.

I think that changing stereotypes and attitudes, it takes time. As we progress and we have more women astronauts and more women in construction sites and everything else, then we're making progress. Discrimination is deeply embedded in our community, but we do have the tools to combat it.

It would be foolish to despise tradition. But with our growing self-consciousness and increasing intelligence we must begin to control tradition and assume a critical attitude toward it, if human relations are ever to change for the better.

Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future.

He who today utters a bold truth that seems to shock some old institution with the premonition of destruction, and that scares men from their propriety, will a hundred years hence be regarded as a remarkably conservative man. And yet the people who stand peculiarly upon what they call the foundations of conservatism, and hold to hard, practical facts, now stand upon that which one hundred years ago was rank heresy.

Whilst so much is being done in the world, to ameliorate the condition of mankind, and the spirit of Freedom is marching with rapid strides and causing tyrants to tremble, may America awake from the apathy in which she has long slumbered.

We should not be followers of traditions that go against human rights...we are human beings and we make traditions.

years ago we would have been burned for this. Now what I am suggesting is that we've advanced.

I think some people are just very passionate that things remain the way they were when they were kids.

I love only extreme novelty or the things of the past.

Politicians against gay marriage now, are the future villains of our American History books.

Scientists are the enemies of tradition , and tradition own all the prisons. - Victor Vigny

Most of us prefer to walk backward into the future, a posture that may be uncomfortable but which at least allows us to keep on looking at familiar things as long as we can.

It is horrible to see everything that one detested in the past coming back wearing the colors of the future.

This is all very nice, because the ideas that Jack and the Beat generation stood for are needed today more than ever. But I'm not so interested in nostalgia. I'm interested in the future.