Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong. Friedrich August von Hayek More Quotes by Friedrich August von Hayek More Quotes From Friedrich August von Hayek There may be few instances in which the superstition that only measurable magnitudes can be important has done positive harm in the economic field: but the present inflation and employment problems are a very serious one. Friedrich August von Hayek superstitions important may In abbreviated form, by a kind of symbol, only the most essential information is passed on and passed on only to those concerned. It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movement of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement. Friedrich August von Hayek watches order hands The Germans would appear as the disturbers of peace, as they already do to some people, merely because they were the first to take the path along which all the others were ultimately to follow. Friedrich August von Hayek path people firsts It is no accident that on the whole there was more beauty and decency to be found in the life of the small peoples, and that among the large ones there was more happiness and content in proportion as they had avoided the deadly blight of centralization. Friedrich August von Hayek blight centralization proportion This means that to entrust to science - or to deliberate control according to scientific principles - more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects. Friedrich August von Hayek scientific-method principles mean As long-term institutions, I am totally against dictatorships. But a dictatorship may be a necessary system for a transitional period... Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism. My personal impression - and this is valid for South America - is that in Chile, for example, we will witness a transition from a dictatorial government to a liberal government. Friedrich August von Hayek government long america 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. Friedrich August von Hayek mathematical-equations character mean Our moral traditions developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product. Friedrich August von Hayek moral tradition reason There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. While the first is the condition of a free society, the second means as DeTocqueville describes it, a new form of servitude. Friedrich August von Hayek I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice. Friedrich August von Hayek Intellects whose desires have outstripped their understanding. Friedrich August von Hayek whose desires understanding
