Friedrich Von Paulus Quotes

It is only because the majority opinion will always be opposed by some that our knowledge and understanding progress. In the process by which opinion is formed, it is very probable that, by the time any view becomes a majority view, it is no longer the best view: somebody will already have advanced beyond the point which the majority have reached. It is because we do not yet know which of the many competing new opinions will prove itself the best that we wait until it has gained sufficient support. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

We did not realise how fragile our civilisation was. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

What use is it that knowledge mounts? It's knowing something good that counts. ~ Friedrich Von Logau

Each member of society can have only a small fraction of the knowledge possessed by all, and ... each is therefore ignorant of most of the facts on which the working of society rests ... civilization rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge which we do not possess. And one of the ways in which civilization helps us to overcome that limitation on the extent of individual knowledge is by conquering intelligence, not by the acquisition of more knowledge, but by the utilization of knowledge which is and which remains widely dispersed among individuals. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

Here effective competition can be created, it is a better way of guiding individual efforts than any other ... regards competition as superior not only because it is in most circumstances the most efficient method known but even more because it is the only method by which our activities can be adjusted to each other without coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

The social sciences, like much of biology but unlike most fields of the physical sciences, have to deal with structures of essential complexity, i.e. with structures whose characteristic properties can be exhibited only by models made up of relatively large numbers of variables. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

The deeper we get into reality, the more numerous will be the questions we cannot answer. ~ Friedrich Von Hugel

It is rarely remembered now that socialism in its beginnings was frankly authoritarian. It began quite openly as a reaction against the liberalism of the French Revolution. The French writers who laid its foundation had no doubt that their ideas could be put into practice only by a strong dictatorial government. The first of modern planners, Saint-Simon, predicted that those who did not obey his proposed planning boards would be 'treated as cattle'. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

If thou art something bring thy soul and interchange with mine. - Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller. ~ Friedrich Schiller

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

The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the "wrong" beliefs. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

The witch mania is shameful. How could we do it? How could we be so ignorant about ourselves and our weaknesses? How could it have happened in the most "advanced," the most "civilized" nations then on Earth? Why was it resolutely supported by conservatives, monarchists, and religious fundamentalists? Why opposed by liberals, Quakers and followers of the Enlightenment? If we're absolutely sure that our beliefs are right, and those of others wrong; that we are motivated by good, and others by evil; that the King of the Universe speaks to us, and not to adherents of very different faiths; that it is wicked to challenge conventional doctrines or to ask searching questions; that our main job is to believe and obey - then the witch mania will recur in its infinite variations down to the time of the last man. Note Friedrich von Spee's very first point, and the implication that improved public understanding of superstition and skepticism might have helped to short-circuit the whole train of causality. If we fail to understand how it worked in the last round, we will not recognize it as it emerges in the next. ~ Carl Sagan

Capitalism is not only a better form of organizing human activity than any deliberate design, any attempt to organize it to satisfy particular preferences, to aim at what people regard as beautiful or pleasant order, but it is also the indispensable condition for just keeping that population alive which exists already in the world. I regard the preservation of what is known as the capitalist system, of the system of free markets and the private ownership of the means of production, as an essential condition of the very survival of mankind. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog. ~ Friedrich Von Schlegel

No human mind can comprehend all the knowledge which guides the actions of society. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

Many of the greatest things man has achieved are not the result of consciously directed thought, and still less the product of a deliberately coordinated effort of many individuals, but of a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

Ever since the beginning of modern science, the best minds have recognized that "the range of acknowledged ignorance will grow with the advance of science." Unfortunately, the popular effect of this scientific advance has been a belief, seemingly shared by many scientists, that the range of our ignorance is steadily diminishing and that we can therefore aim at more comprehensive and deliberate control of all human activities. It is for this reason that those intoxicated by the advance of knowledge so often become the enemies of freedom. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

If we can reduce the risk of friction likely to lead to war, this is probably all we can reasonably hope to achieve. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

The inevitableness, the idealism, and the blessing of war, as an indispensable and stimulating law of development, must be repeatedly emphasized. ~ Friedrich Von Bernhardi

It is when it is contended that "in a democracy right is what the majority makes it to be" that democracy degenerates into demagoguery. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

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. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

A policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

Man-like is it to fall into sin,
Fiend-like is it to dwell therein;
Christ-like is it for sin to grieve,
God-like is it all sin to leave. ~ Friedrich Von Logau

A general flat minimum-wage law for all industry is permissible, but I do not think that it is a particularly wise method of achieving the end. I know much better methods of providing a minimum for everybody. But once you turn from laying down a general minimum for all industry to decreeing particular and different minimum for different industries, then, of course, you make the price mechanism inoperative, because it is no longer the price mechanism which will guide people between industries and trades. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

My master, is the best of all husbands in all the five quarters of the globe; and his wife bears him an amount of love, the greatness of which can only be compared with the English national debt. ~ Christian Friedrich Von Stockmar

We must shed the illusion that we can deliberately 'create the future of mankind' ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

We can either have a free Parliament or a free people. Personal freedom requires that all authority is restrained by long-run principles which the opinion of the people approves. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

Civilization enables us constantly to profit from knowledge which we individually do not possess and because each individual's use of his particular knowledge may serve to assist others unknown to him in achieving their ends that men as members of civilized society can pursue their individual ends so much more successfully than they could alone. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

It is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the intellectual that he judges new ideas not by their specific merits but by the readiness with which they fit into his general conceptions, into the picture of the world which he regards as modern or advanced. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

Never will man penetrate deeper into error than when he is continuing on a road which has led him to great success ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

The moral consequences of totalitarian propaganda ... are destructive of all morals because they undermind one of the foundations of all morals: the sense of and respect for truth. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

That there is little hope of international order or lasting peace so long as every country is free to employ whatever measures it thinks desirable in its own immediate interest, however damaging they may be to others, needs little emphasis now. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

Our moral traditions developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

It is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

How alarmed that same courageous Friedrich von Schiller would have been if someone had said to him, "You don't need to honor your father. People who have done you such harm do not deserve your love or respect, even if they are your parents. The price you pay for such filial devotion is appalling, the terrible physical torments you repeatedly go through. You can free yourself of them if you no longer obey the Fourth Commandment." What would Schiller have said to that? ~ Alice Miller

If I am not mistaken, psychology, psychiatry and some branches of sociology, not to speak about the so-called philosophy of history, are even more affected by what I have called the scientistic prejudice, and by specious claims of what science can achieve. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

The historian is a prophet looking backwards. ~ Friedrich Von Schlegel

Unlike liberalism, with its fundamental belief in the long-range power of ideas, conservatism is bound by the stock of ideas inherited at a given time. And since it does not really believe in the power of argument, its last resort is generally a claim to superior wisdom, based on some self-arrogated superior quality. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

If we were to make no better use of victory than to countenance existing trends in this direction, only too visible before 1939, we might indeed find that we have defeated National Socialism merely to create a world of many national socialisms, differing in detail, but all equally totalitarian, nationalistic, and in recurrent conflict with each other. ~ 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

The conception that government should be guided by majority opinion makes sense only if that opinion is independent of government. The ideal of democracy rests on the belief that the view which will direct government emerges from an independent and spontaneous process. It requires, therefore, the existence of a large sphere independent of majority control in which the opinions of the individuals are formed. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

He had read von Lambert's book on terrorism, there were two pages devoted to the Arab resistance movement, von Lambert refused to call them terrorists, which didn't preclude, and he had emphasized this, that nonterrorists were also capable of atrocities, Auschwitz, for instance, was not the work of terrorists but of state employees ... ~ Friedrich Durrenmatt

As is true with respect to other great evils, the measures by which war might be made altogether impossible for the future may well be worse than even war itself. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek