Friedrich Hayek

The system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.

Economic control…is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served.

Coercion is evil precisely because it…eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another.

The chief evil is unlimited government…nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power.

Once wide coercive powers are given to government agencies…such powers cannot be effectively controlled.

Liberty is not merely one particular value…it is the source and condition of most moral values. What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.

The market is not an invention of capitalism. It has existed for centuries. It is an invention of civilization.

I have a great relationship with Kim Jong Un. He gave us back our hostages. I didn’t pay $1.8 billion. I paid nothing. But it was very smart that he did it.

A basic principle of modern state capitalism is that costs and risks are socialized to the extent possible, while profit is privatized.

Work continuously to trim the White House staff from your first day to your last. All the pressures are to the contrary.

The profusion of government … [has] retarded the natural progress.

Why, Sir, most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things.

That just fires up his worshipful base, providing more evidence that the hated liberal elites are trying to destroy the one guy in the political arena who is dedicated to defending the common folk – who he is shafting, with delight, at every opportunity.

Of course all such conclusions about appropriate actions against the rich and powerful are based on a fundamental flaw: This is us, and that is them. This crucial principle, deeply embedded in Western culture, suffices to undermine even the most precise analogy and the most impeccable reasoning.

So for example, worker- and community- controlled enterprises are germs of a future society within the present one. And those not only can be developed, but are being developed.

It’s alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States.

Both political parties have moved to the right during the neoliberal period. Today’s New Democrats are pretty much what used to be called ‘moderate Republicans’. The ‘political revolution’ that Bernie Sanders called for, rightly, would not have greatly surprised Dwight Eisenhower.

What we call intellectuals, they didn’t used to call them that, it’s a modern term. Historically, what you find is overwhelmingly this group is supportive of power. There’s usually a fringe of dissidents who are treated pretty badly.

[on Bill and Hillary Clinton] Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.

If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.

There’s a lot of debate about what’s happening in the Labour party at the present time. And I am inundated with questions, questions, questions all the time. And I have patience that is infinite to answer questions, questions, questions. But one I got today really did puzzle me. They said: how are you coping with the pressure that’s on you? I simply said this: ‘There is no pressure on me. None whatsoever.’ The real pressure, the real pressure – real pressure – is when you don’t have enough money to feed your kids, when you don’t have a roof over your head, when you’re wondering if you’re going to be cared for. When you’re wondering how you can survive. You’re wondering how you’re going to cope with the debts you’ve incurred … That is the real pressure in our society. For those people struggling on low pay, struggling on zero-hours contracts, not knowing what’s coming from one week to the other, not knowing if they’ll be able to pay the rent, not knowing if they’re going to be homeless, not knowing if their children will end up in care, that’s the kind of brutal pressure that’s put on people every day of the week in this country.