Friedrich Hayek Quotes

It's this mingling of the economic and political elite which is really destroying our democracy.

A politician's goal is always to manipulate public debate. I think there are some politicians with higher goals. But all of them get corrupted by power.

The actual rulers in a parliamentary democracy are the class of professional politicians. In theory, they are supposed to represent the people, but in fact they rule over them.

He who is the most strenuous for the rights of the people, when vested with power is as eager after for the prerogatives of government.

Government is everywhere to a great extent controlled by powerful minorities, with an interest distinct from that of the mass of the people.

I think the government … has a very different interest. Usually in fact the opposite of what the people's interest is.

Democratically elected leaders, forced to accommodate the real forces that shape their nation-state’s future—capital and the economic and military interests of more-powerful states—do so only to face the ire of their own citizens, who see themselves (perhaps rightly) as the losers of these compromises.]

The problem is never the populist’s imperfect capacity to represent the people’s will; rather, it’s always the institutions that somehow produced the wrong outcomes. So even if they look properly democratic, there must be something going on behind the scenes that allows corrupt elites to continue to betray the people. Conspiracy theories are thus not a curious addition to populist rhetoric; they are rooted in and emerge from the very logic of populism itself.

We all want prosperity, but not at the expense of liberty. Poverty is not as great a danger to liberty as is wealth, with its corrupting, demoralizing influences. Let us never have a Government at Washington owing its retention to the power of the millionaires rather than to the will of millions.

Political corruption is eating our democracy out from the inside. Most Americans know that. But democratic and economic health can't be easily disentangled.

I find the Democratic party overall, on a macro level, to be institutionally corrupt.

Our democracies are increasingly captured by a ruling class that seeks to perpetuate its privileges.

Political books are so often written from the perspective of the politicians, not from the point of view of the people.

Forget about war or disease or poverty. The apocalypse is when America's elected president is no longer supervised by the unelected ruling establishment.

There is a limited elite that understands the secrets of their own techniques, but not necessarily of all techniques. These men are close to the seat of modern governmental power. The state is no longer founded on the 'average citizen', but on the ability and knowledge of this elite. The average man is altogether unable to penetrate technical secrets or governmental organization and consequently can exert no influence at all on the state.

To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.

The probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tender-hearted person would get the job of whipping-master in a slave plantation.

Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit. A politician is anyone who asks individuals to surrender part of their liberty - their power and privilege - to State, Masses, Mankind, Planet Earth, or whatever. This state, those masses, that mankind, and the planet will then be run by ... politicians.

All political power comes from the barrel of either guns, pussy, or opium pipes, and people seem to like it that way.

A democracy exists whenever those who are free and are not well-off, being in the majority, are in sovereign control of government, an oligarchy when control lies with the rich and better-born, these being few.

With people in high office, the old - you go into the extreme, which is absolute power and absolute power corrupts.

Instead of recognizing the State as ‘the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men,’ the run of mankind, with rare exceptions, regards it not only as a final and indispensable entity, but also as, in the main, beneficent. The mass-man, ignorant of its history, regards its character and intentions as social rather than anti-social; and in that faith he is willing to put at its disposal an indefinite credit of knavery, mendacity and chicane, upon which its administrators may draw at will.

Plainly elites in America don't want democracy. And why should they? Democracy is always harmful to elite interests. Almost by definition.

Political organizations are formed to keep the powerful in power.

You know what kind of person it takes to run for President? Not normal. They could start out okay, but by the time they reach that level they've sold their soul to the devil so many times and stomped the guts out of enough people that they are definitely not like you and me, not even close.