Perhaps even more than elsewhere current notions of what is desirable and practicable are here still of a kind which may well produce the opposite of what they promise.

We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.

Though freedom and wealth are both good things which most of us desire and though we often need both to obtain what we wish, they still remain different. Whether or not I am my own master and can follow my own choice and whether the possibilities from which I must choose are many or few are two entirely different questions. The courtier living in the lap of luxury but at the beck and call of his prince may be much less free than a poor peasant or artisan, less able to live his own life and to choose his own opportunities for usefulness.

There is, in a competitive society, nobody who can exercise even a fraction of the power which a socialist planning board would possess.

When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.

... I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much undetermined and unpredictable, to a pretense of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.

The chief evil is unlimited government, and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power.