I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it.

The Socratic maxim that the recognition of our ignorance is the beginning of wisdom has profound significance for our understanding of society. Most of the advantages of social life, especially in the more advanced forms that we call "civilization" rest on the fact that the individual benefits from more knowledge than he is aware of. It might be said that civilization begins when the individual in the pursuit of his ends can make use of more knowledge than he has himself acquired and when he can transcend the boundaries of his ignorance by profiting from knowledge he does not himself possess.

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

There can be little doubt that man owes some of his greatest successes in the past to the fact that he has not been able to control social life. His continued advance may well depend on his deliberately refraining from exercising controls which are now in his power.

I am certain, however, that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.

Competition is like experimentation in science, a discovery process, and it must rely on the self interest of producers, it must allow them to use their knowledge for their purposes, because nobody else possesses the information

To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about.