Friedrich A. von Hayek (8 May 1899 - 23 March 1992)

• I do not think it is an exaggeration to say history is largely a history of inflation. Usually inflations engineered by governments for the gain of governments.
• Coercion is evil precisely because it thus eliminates an individual as a thinking & valuing person & makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another. Free action, in which a person pursues his own aims by the means indicated by his own knowledge, must be based on data which cannot be shaped at will by another.
• Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.
• The system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.
• It is indeed probable that more harm & misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil.
• If Socialists understood economics, they wouldn't be Socialists.