"The social product which is now maintaining a human population of this world four or five hundred times as large as that which man could achieve in the natural hunting and gathering stage is owed only to the division of labor, skills, and knowledge. This division could never have been designed or planned, but it arose through and is now maintained by the guiding service of competitive market prices and wages that tell each person where its efforts can make the largest contribution to the total. These self-generating signals, which inform the individuals about the combined efforts of thousands of events of which they can have no direct information, bring about an adaptation of the individual efforts to the unknown. No central direction could achieve this adaptation because the knowledge of all the facts of which the market takes account is spread among thousands and cannot be known to any central authority. It is, of course, impossible to improve signals when one does not know what determines them. Wealth, which social justice would like to distribute as a reward for merit and need, is, therefore, due to the circumstance that the direction of individual efforts is guided by a choice between returns which depends largely on accidental circumstances of time and place and is effected but not conclusively determined by what the individual can know or do. Thus, the wealth which the advocates of social justice want to redistribute would not exist if social justice reigned. Social justice is a fraud, a promise to distribute what one would not have if one followed its bidding. Wealth just would not be there or would rapidly disappear if the ordering by the principles of the market that now guide its production were replaced by some others which would give to each that to which he imagines himself to be entitled."

“Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic and power adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desirable if this world is to become a better place.”

“I have certainly never contended that generally authoritarian governments are more likely to secure individual liberty than democratic ones, but rather the contrary. This does not mean, however, that in some historical circumstances personal liberty may not have been better protected under an authoritarian than democratic government. More recently I have not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende. Nor have I heard any sensible person claim that in the principalities of Monaco or Lichtenstein, which I am told are not precisely democratic, personal liberty is smaller than anywhere else!”

“We do not owe our morals to our intelligence: we owe them to the fact that some groups uncomprehendingly accepted certain rules of conduct — the rules of private property, of honesty, and of the family — that enabled the groups practising them to prosper, multiply, and gradually to displace the others.”

“Reader's Digest version of The Road to Serfdom”

“There is no salvation for Britain unless the special privileges granted to the trade unions in 1906 are revoked. The average level of real wages of British workers would undoubtedly be higher, and their chances of finding employment better, if the wages of different occupations were again determined by the market and all limitations on the work an individual is allowed to do were removed.”

“Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities it provides for unforeseen and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom.”