A Quote by Friedrich August von Hayek

What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.

Friedrich August von Hayek

Quote Topics

Able Free Free Society Individual More Much Offers Only Society Than Were Would Would Be

Quote Author

Friedrich August von Hayek
Austrian - Economist
May 8, 1899 - March 23, 1992

We must show that liberty is not merely one particular value but that 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. We can therefore not fully appreciate the value of freedom until we know how a society of free men as a whole differs from one in which unfreedom prevails.

Friedrich August von Hayek

The appeal of conservatism is the mutuality it asserts between individual and political freedom, its beautiful idea of a free man in a free society. And it offers minorities the one thing they can never get from liberalism: human rather than racial dignity.

Shelby Steele

People are falling all over themselves to send you free shoes and free cufflinks and colonic irrigations for two. Nobody ever offers you a free acceptance speech. There just seems to be a gap in the market. I would love to be able to pull out a speech by Dolce & Gabbana.

Hugh Laurie

At some point in your life you have to engage with the fact that you are part of a society. Yeah the individual is the most important facet in society but unless every individual is the recipient of free health care, free education decent affordable housing and a proper pension then only the rich and powerful will be individuals and the rest of us will be exploited by them.

Billy Bragg

What a terrible thing could be freedom. Trees were free when they were uprooted by the wind; ships were free when they were torn from their moorings; men were free when they were cast out of their homes—free to starve, free to perish of cold and hunger.

Radclyffe Hall

It's good to pay high taxes - you have free schools, free universities. It's a much more decent society than those where everybody pays their own way, and some people don't get anything.

Stellan Skarsgard

It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.

Friedrich August von Hayek

A ‘liberal paradise’ would be a place where everybody has guaranteed employment, free comprehensive health care, free education, free food, free housing, free clothing, free utilities and only law enforcement personnel have guns. And, believe it or not, such a liberal utopia does indeed exist. ... It’s called prison.

Joe Arpaio

The whole attitude of society has become much more open and realistic. They realize that the only way to make a more democratic and free society is to let different opinions come out.

Ai Weiwei

Individual freedom and drug laws contradict each other. In a genuinely free society, people are free to ingest whatever they want to ingest, no matter how harmful or destructive. What people ingest is none of the government's business. If drug users or drug addicts wish to get help, a free society provides the means to do so.

Jacob G. Hornberger

I came to the United States because I valued living as a free person, one who is able to advocate in a democratic society. Unfortunately, the U.S. has been turning into a less free society, a police and surveillance state, especially after 9/11.

Sami Al-Arian

Advertising and the free society are closely connected. Advertising helps to make a free society remain so by increasing competition, and by helping to maintain the freedom of the mass media themselves. The free society is one where advertising and advertising agencies are likely to be in considerable demand, though it is true that even in a totally centralist society there would still be a need for organisations and people to have access to mass communication media.

John Treasure

We need a free economy not only for the renewed material prosperity it will bring, but because it is indispensable to individual freedom, human dignity and to a more just, more honest society.

Margaret Thatcher

Terrorism thrives on a free society. The terrorist uses the feelings in a free society to sap the will of civilization to resist. If the terrorist succeeds, he has won and the whole of free society has lost.

Margaret Thatcher

You can only hear clearly when you sit quietly, when you give your attention. Nor can you have order if you are not free to watch, if you are not free to listen, if you are not free to be considerate. This problem of freedom and order is one of the most difficult and urgent problems in life. It is a very complex problem. It needs to be thought over much more than mathematics, geography, or history.