Friedrich Hayek Quotes

I don't trust liberals, I trust conservatives.

Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence; Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.

What if you are a conservative in a liberal environment? Then what you are conserving is liberalism.

On my conservative days I’m a Democrat.

In every society liberals are not very popular. Liberalism is not a populist movement.

I am not nor ever have been, a man of the right. My position was on the left and is now in the centre of politics.

A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted — in the air. A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest — at the command — of his head.

Liberals amuse me. I am a socialist.

'Socialist' is the nastiest thing you can say about an American politician in some quarters.

No, I do not identify with the right wing.

My parents are awesome, but they're pretty left-wing.

The idea that liberal societies are bound together by philosophical beliefs seems to me to be ludicrous. Philosophy is not that important to politics.

Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties: 1. Those who fear and distrust the people and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them.... In every country these two parties exist.... Call them, therefore, liberals and serviles, Jacobins and Ultras, Whigs and Tories, republicans and federalists, aristocrats and democrats, or by whatever name you please, they are the same party still and pursue the same object.

I do not believe that our place is at the comfortable mid-point between the extremes of left and right.

… the Democratic Party in robes.

It's very easy for liberals and conservatives to agree upon liberty, but it is harder for them to agree upon equality.

Conservatives read books and liberals don’t.

A liberal is a conservative who's been indicted.

In truth, the parties of Whig [Liberal] and Tory [Conservative] are those of nature. They exist in all countries, whether called by these names, or by those of Aristocrats and Democrats, Cote Droite and Cote Gauche, Ultras and Radicals, Serviles, and Liberals.

Everybody in Mariposa is neither liberal or conservative or else is both.

Conservatives put the law before the man. Progressives put the man before the law.

The conservatives see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories—with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals see man as a soul freewheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe—but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread.

How did the progressive Republican Party of Lincoln, Roosevelt and Eisenhower become the reactionary party of Ronald Reagan, the tea party and Paul Ryan? There is nothing random about these ideological shifts. They reflect the party’s — and the nation’s — central unresolved problem: the tension between equality of opportunity and protection of private property.

Liberal hypocrites like Mr. Weinstein were a big reason 63 million Americans voted for a conservative hypocrite like Mr. Trump.

I was taught, growing up, that there are two ends of the political spectrum: left and right. But there's so much more than that. For me, it's about liberty versus authoritarianism.