Friedrich Hayek Quotes

A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.

Spreading the wealth punishes success while setting America on course for a greater dependency on government.

Government has got to work for all of us and not just for a few billionaires..

Worrying about the poor is one thing. To contend that equality is necessary for growth is an altogether different and more radical idea.

I don't subscribe to the view that people who are better off don't want to live in a more equal society.

Socialism is the phantastic younger brother of despotism, which it wants to inherit. Socialism wants to have the fullness of state force which before only existed in despotism. ... However, it goes further than anything in the past because it aims at the formal destruction of the individual ... who ... can be used to improve communities by an expedient organ of government.

Imagine what would happen if the government were to take the wealth of 200,000 of India's richest people and redistribute it amongst 2 million of India's poorest? We would hear a lot about socialist appropriation and the death of democracy. Why should taking from the rich be called appropriation and taking from the poor be called development?

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

The only way to have a better world and end poverty is by closing the gap between the top and the bottom.

If no man could become rich in Peru, no man could become poor.

It's not enough to have economic growth. You have to distribute wealth throughout all of society.

There is a legitimate concern about wealth distribution in the United States, but the answer is not to scapegoat any individual who makes over $200,000 per year and to try to sell the fraud that the government can equitably take the money of those who have earned it and give it to those who haven't.

What is most important for democracy is not that great fortunes should not exist, but that great fortunes should not remain in the same hands. In that way there are rich men, but they do not form a class.

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

We need to have the social investments by which to quote unquote distribute some of that wealth.

I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P. J. O'Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

Well, first of all, I think that a lot of the voters who are voting for the tea party candidates have really good impulses. That is, they believe that for years and years and years, the people with wealth and power or government power have done well and ordinary people have not. That's true.

No one should have more than five times the wealth of the poorest person.

Support of private ownership does not mean that anyone has the right to unlimited accumulation of wealth

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

For the good of Spain, I should like there to be rather fewer rich people and rather fewer poor.

The distribution of wealth is just as important as its creation.

Our devotion to individual freedom limits our readiness to give central government the power to override our traditional power structure.

It's not class warfare to talk about fairness.

Unless you’re at the very top, you need a more equitable economy.