The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

The central problem of management is how spontaneous interaction of people within a firm, each possessing only bits of knowledge, can bring about the competitive success that could only be achieved by the deliberate direction of a senior management that possesses the combined knowledge of all employees and contractors

I was quite depressed two weeks ago when I spent an afternoon at Brentano's Bookshop in New York and was looking at the kind of books most people read. That seems to be hopeless; once you see that you lose all hope.

It is, indeed, part of the liberal attitude to assume that, especially in the economic field, the self-regulating forces of the market will somehow bring about the required adjustments to new conditions, although no one can foretell how they will do this in a particular instance. There is perhaps no single factor contributing so much to people

Once politics become a tug-of-war for shares in the income pie, decent government is impossible.

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

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