Friedrich Hayek Quotes

The most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power.

Gun control means control. It means control for the government and the government starts controlling the people.

Freedom is our most precious commodity and if we are not eternally vigilant, government will take it all away. Individual freedom demands individual responsibility.

A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.

A government role in our society should be inherently suspect …. There is something inherently coercive in the nature of government.

Rights are either God-given as part of the divine plan, or they are granted by government as part of the political plan. If we accept the premise that human rights are granted by government, then we must be willing to accept the corollary that they can be denied by government.

Governments don't control things. A government can't control the economy without controlling people.

Government can't do anything for you except in proportion as it can do something to you.

[D]ecade after decade, through taxes and regulations, governments at all levels took ever-increasing control over people's lives, wealth, and property. The control grew exponentially, decade after decade. The rationale was that the control was necessary -- for society, for the poor, for the nation, even for freedom itself. Americans continued living their life of the lie: they continued believing that the more control government exercised over their lives and property, the freer they became.

The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents.

Government is about coercion. Limiting government is the single most important instrument for guaranteeing liberty. We're working on a third generation which has little in the way of education about what our Constitution means and why it was written. Thus, we've fallen easy prey to charlatens, quacks, and hustlers.

Government central planning means over-riding other people's plans.

The state is or can be master of money, but in a free society it is master of very little else.

As the old saying goes, 'money is power' and the more money the government takes, the more power it has over individuals.

Government is the natural enemy of freedom.

Big government makes small citizens.

Taking legislative authority away from the federal government doesn't necessarily mean freer individuals. It might just mean granting vastly more authority to the states--which already have far broader police powers than most of us would care to admit.

Individual freedom and drug laws contradict each other. In a genuinely free society, people are free to ingest whatever they want to ingest, no matter how harmful or destructive. What people ingest is none of the government's business. If drug users or drug addicts wish to get help, a free society provides the means to do so.

To continue on the road we Americans have traveled for the past century is ultimately to deliver ourselves completely into the hands of an unlimited government. We can have a free society or a welfare state. We cannot have both.

It isn't possible to give government just a little control over the economy and our lives. Once we cede that power to government, it uses the power to take more from us. That's why every year the government controls more of our lives.

When I hear the president of the United States in a great little rhetorical flourish talk about the leavening hand of the government, everybody knows that leavening hand is attached to the long arm of the Internal Revenue Service. And no one mistakes the Internal Revenue Service with something called liberty.

You know the critical thing with the Communist countries is Communism, which by definition consists of control by the government.

It doesn't require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the deed or the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of life and death over that business or property?

Government is never more dangerous than when our desire to have it help us blinds us to its great power to harm us.

The government that can take everything from somebody can take everything from everybody. And there ought to be a limit.