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"If most people are not willing to see the difficulty, this is mainly because, consciously or unconsciously, they assume that it will be they who will settle these questions for the others, and because they are convinced of their own capacity to do this."
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"It's not a slam at you when people are rude, it's a slam at the people they've met before."

"We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started."

"When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up."

"I believe that in every country the people themselves are more peaceably and liberally inclined than their governments."

"Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted."
Explore more quotes by Friedrich August von Hayek

"Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom."

"We know: of course, with regard to the market and similar social structures, a great many facts which we cannot measure and on which indeed we have only some very imprecise and general information."

"We have indeed at the moment little cause for pride: as a profession we have made a mess of things."

"I regard it in fact as the great advantage of the mathematical technique that it allows us to describe, by means of algebraic equations, the general character of a pattern even where we are ignorant of the numerical values which will determine its particular manifestation."

"It can hardly be denied that such a demand quite arbitrarily limits the facts which are to be admitted as possible causes of the events which occur in the real world."

"Why should we, however, in economics, have to plead ignorance of the sort of facts on which, in the case of a physical theory, a scientist would certainly be expected to give precise information?"

"'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded."

"We know, in other words, the general conditions in which what we call, somewhat misleadingly, an equilibrium will establish itself: but we never know what the particular prices or wages are which would exist if the market were to bring about such an equilibrium."

"The progress of the natural sciences in modern times has of course so much exceeded all expectations that any suggestion that there may be some limits to it is bound to arouse suspicion."

"I have arrived at the conviction that the neglect by economists to discuss seriously what is really the crucial problem of our time is due to a certain timidity about soiling their hands by going from purely scientific questions into value questions."
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