Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 1 Quotes

“Civilization rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge which we do not possess.”
― Friedrich Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 1: Rules and Order

“It is necessary to realize that the sources of many of the most harmful agents in this world are often not evil men but highminded idealists, and that in particular the foundations of totalitarian barbarism have been laid by honourable and well-meaning scholars who never recognized the offspring they produced.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 1: Rules and Order

“Complete rationality of action in the Cartesian sense demands complete knowledge of all the relevant facts. A designer or engineer needs all the data and full power to control or manipulate them if he is to organize the material objects to produce the intended result. But the success of action in society depends on more particular facts than anyone can possibly know. And our whole civilization in consequence rests, and must rest, on our believing rnuch that we cannot know to be true in the Cartesian sense.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 1: Rules and Order

“Human emotions are attached to concrete objects, and the emotions ofjustice in particu- lar are still very much connected with the visible needs of the group to which each person belongs-the needs of the trade or profession, of the clan or the village, the town or the country to which each belongs. Only a mental reconstruction of the overall order of the Great Society enables us to comprehend that the deliberate aim at concrete common purposes, which to most people still appears as more meritorious and superior to blind obedience to abstract rules, would destroy that larger order in which all human beings count alike.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 1: Rules and Order

“One of the main themes of this book will be that the rules of just conduct which the lawyer studies serve a kind of order of the character of which the lawyer is largely ignorant; and that this order is studied chiefly by the economist who in turn is similarly ignorant of the character of the rules of conduct on which the order that he studies rests.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 1: Rules and Order

“It appears to me also that the same factual error has long appeared to make insoluble the most crucial problem of political organization, namely how to limit the ‘popular will’ without placing another ‘will’ above it.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 1: Rules and Order