Wherever liberty as we understand it has been destroyed, this has almost always been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people

The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest "functionaire" possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose desecration it depends whether and how I am allowed to live or to work.

There is perhaps no single factor contributing so much to people's frequent reluctance to let the market work as their inability to conceive how some necessary balance, between demand and supply, between exports and imports, or the like, will be brought about without deliberate control. The conservative feels safe and content only if he is assured that some higher wisdom watches and supervises change, only if he knows that some authority is charged with keeping the change "orderly.

We must shed the illusion that we can deliberately 'create the future of mankind'

Socialism can only be put into practice only by methods which most socialists disapprove.

And who will deny that a world in which the wealthy are powerful is still a better world than one in which only the already powerful can acquire wealth?

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