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"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."
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"Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle."

"Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. People have the right to expect that these wants will be provided for by this wisdom."

"I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses."

"I believe there is something out there watching us. Unfortunately, it's the government."

"I am concerned about the whole man. I am concerned about what the people, using their government as an instrument and a tool, can do toward building the whole man, which will mean a better society and a better world."

"The Federal Government should be the last resort, not the first. Ask if a potential program is truly a federal responsibility or whether it can better be handled privately, by voluntary organizations, or by local or state governments."

"Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure."

"It's a good thing we don't get all the government we pay for."

"We are a forward-looking people, and we must have a forward-looking government."

"The government must pursue a course of complete neutrality toward religion."
Explore more quotes by Friedrich August von Hayek

"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."

"Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom."
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