[T]hose who are willing to surrender their freedom for security have always demanded that if they give up their full freedom it should also be taken from those not prepared to do so.

We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.

Once wide coercive powers are given to governmental agencies for particular purposes, such powers cannot be effectively controlled by democratic assemblies.

Without the rich - without those who accumulated capital - those poor who could exist at all would be very much poorer indeed, scratching a livelihood from marginal lands on which every drought would kill most of the children they would be trying to raise.

[The] impersonal process of the market ... can be neither just nor unjust, because the results are not intended or foreseen.

The successful politician owes his power to the fact that he moves within the accepted framework of thought, that he thinks and talks conventionally. It would be almost a contradiction in terms for a politician to be a leader in the field of ideas. His task in a democracy is to find out what the opinions held by the largest number are, not to give currency to new opinions which may become the majority view in some distant future.

The idea that human kind can shape the world according to wish is what I call the fatal conceit