Friedrich Hayek Quotes

'Democratic' in its original meaning refers to unlimited majority rule....a social system in which one's work, one's property, one's mind, and one's life are at the mercy of any gang that may muster the vote of a majority at any moment for any purpose

It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority.... From the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason.

The majority of people wherever found ought in all questions to govern the minority.

In a democracy, you must follow the will of the majority, which may be right or wrong, moral or immoral, just or unjust. If that's the ruling of the majority that is what you should follow, respect, and obey — although you may continue to disagree with it.

The majority prevails in a democracy, eventually.

A government by the passions of the multitude, or, no less correctly, according to the vices and ambitions of their leaders, is a democracy.

People mistake majoritarianism for democracy.

The greatest fallacy of democracy is that everyone's opinion is worth the same

It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.

A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.

Democracy is nothing but the Tyranny of Majorities, the most abominable tyranny of all, for it is not based on the authority of a religion, not upon the nobility of a race, not on the merits of talents and of riches. It merely rests upon numbers and hides behind the name of the people.

Democracy is necessarily despotism, as it establishes an executive power contrary to the general will; all being able to decide against one whose opinion may differ, the will of all is therefore not that of all: which is contradictory and opposite to liberty.

A majority can do anything.

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.

Government, in which the majority rules in all things, cannot be based on justice.

If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.

A democratic government must always be left free to be operated upon by the will of the majority of the time being. All that the government of the day can do is to ascertain what now appears to be the best principle.

In the United States, where the numerical majority have long been in full possession of collective despotism, they would probably be as unwilling to part with it as a single despot or an aristocracy.

The dictatorship of the majority is a bugaboo which haunts the books of political theorists but has never been found in the flesh in modern history

The voice of the majority is no proof of justice.

Democracy passes into despotism.

Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the majority is ignorant.

The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.

We must reflect more on what democracy in the exercise of authority would mean. Is truth determined by a majority vote, only for a new 'truth' to be 'discovered' by a new majority tomorrow?