Friedrich Hayek Quotes

Tyranny and anarchy are alike incompatible with freedom, security, and the enjoyment of opportunity.

Millions of people have to restore liberty and have to understand the danger and personal risk they face in a police state.

The most persistent threat to freedom, to the rights of Americans, is fear.

In any nation in which people's rights have been subordinated to the rights of the few, in any totalitarian nation, the first institution to be dismantled is the jury. I was, I am, afraid.

Man and fascism cannot co-exist. If fascism conquers, man will cease to exist and there will remain only man-like creatures that have undergone an internal transformation. But if man, man who is endowed with reason and kindness, should conquer, then Fascism must perish, and those who have submitted to it will once again become people.

No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine

Every nation that has ended in tyranny has come to that end by way of good order. It certainly does not follow from this that peoples should scorn public peace, but neither should they be satisfied with that and nothing more. A nation that asks nothing of government but the maintenance of order is already a slave in the depths of its heart; it is a slave of its well-being, ready for the man who will put it in chains.

Without democracy freedom is a chimera

Setting people to spy on one another is not the way to protect freedom.

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.

Is not liberty the destruction of all despotism - including, of course, legal despotism?

There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself.

I'm tired of living in a police state.

Every dictator is an enemy of freedom, an opponent of law.

If a free society is ever destroyed in America, it will be done in the name of one particular vision of liberty and freedom.

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away for expedients.

... a step in the direction of tyranny.

The human mind is ever oscillating between the extremes of authority and individualism; and if the former – the Catholic idea – finds lodgment in the minds of this people, we ring the death-knell of American liberties.

Freedom is indivisible. As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop.

Our liberty cannot depend on the good intention of those in power.

… the mortal enemy of liberty

I would be opposed to any kind of totalitarian control.

When an American government takes on characteristics that elevate the state above the individual, it must be vigorously opposed as a form of, or step toward, tyranny.

Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force?