Friedrich Hayek Quotes

If we're free to do what we want, why does government always have a plan for us?

What is politically defined as economic planning is the forcible superseding of other people's plans by Government officials.

Where the state begins, individual liberty ceases, and vice versa.

Whenever regulation increases, personal freedom decreases.

Individual liberty depends upon keeping government under control.

Socialism requires that government becomes your god.

Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.

I don't want to live in a nanny state where people are telling me where I can go and what I can do.

The maxim, that governments ought to train the people in the way in which they should go, sounds well. But is there any reason for believing that a government is more likely to lead the people in the right way than the people to fall into the right way of themselves?

I would much rather see responsibilities exercised by individuals than have them imposed by the government.

Who knows? Maybe my life belongs to God. Maybe it belongs to me. But I do know one thing: I'm damned if it belongs to the government.

Who can be against progress, after all? But it's a fraudulent use of the word - because for the Progressive, progress is marked not be how free you are, but how much government can 'do' for you.

No less than 50 percent of the means of production must be in the hands of the state.

My thinking tends to be libertarian. That is, I oppose intrusions of the state into the private realm—as in abortion, sodomy, prostitution, pornography, drug use, or suicide, all of which I would strongly defend as matters of free choice in a representative democracy.

There is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.

Libertarianism is a way of measuring how the government and other kinds of systems respect the individual. At the core of libertarianism is the idea that the individual is sacrosanct and that anything that's done contrary to the well-being of the individual needs some pretty serious justification.

We think the government is running the country, but it is just a policymaker. Unknowingly, people are inviting the government to run their lives. The only business of the government is to come up with the right policies.

It really is this: you are either for liberty, you're for freedom, and you're for living how you want to live without infringing and impugning on anyone else's rights, or you want the state to deal with everything.

You have to ask yourself, 'Who owns me? Do I own myself or am I just another piece of government property?'

Censorship, telling people how to live their lives I completely disagree with.

Government planning always involves compulsion.

No government can make me wear a veil, no government can force me not to wear it either

[Socialistic] economic planning, regulation, and intervention pave the way to totalitarianism by building a power structure that will inevitably be seized by the most power-hungry and unscrupulous.

I am for . . . each individual doing just as he chooses in all matters which concern nobody else.

[People] don't like the government telling them what to do or telling them how to live their lives.