- ‘The theory which is once again put forth, that the Germans as such are inherently vicious, is hardly tolerable… The contention that only the peculiar wickedness of the Germans has produced the Nazi system is like to become the excuse for forcing on us the very institutions which have produced that wickedness.’ (9)
- ‘When the course of civilization takes an unexpected turn – when, instead of the continuous progress which we have come to expect, we find ourselves threatened by evils associated by us with past ages of barbarism – we naturally blame anything but ourselves.’ (13)
- ‘We have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past. Although we had been warned by some of the greatest political thinkers of the nineteenth century, by De Tocqueville and Lord Acton, that socialism means slavery, we have steadily moved in the direction of socialism.’ (16)
- ‘The promise of greater freedom has become one of the most effective weapons of socialist propaganda.’ (31)
- ‘It is a revealing fact that few planners are content to say that central planning is desirable. Most of them affirm that we can no longer choose but are compelled by circumstances beyond our control to substitute planning for competition.’ (49)
- ‘That the division of labor has reached the extent which makes modern civilization possible we owe to the fact that it did not have to be consciously created but that man stumbled on a method by which the division of labor could be extended from beyond the limits within which it could have been planned. Any further growth of its complexity, therefore, far from making central direction more necessary, makes it more important than ever that we should use a technique which does not depend on conscious control.’ (56)
- ‘Every one of the may things which, considered in isolation, it would be possible to achieve in a planned society creates enthusiasts for planning who feel confident that they will be able to instill into the directors of such a society their sense of the value of the particular objective… it unites almost all single-minded idealists.’ (60-61)
- ‘We all think that our personal order of values is not merely personal but that in a free discussion among rational people we would convince the others that ours is the right one.’ (61)
- ‘Up to the present the growth of civilization has been accompanied by a steady dimunition of the sphere in which individual actions are bound by fixed rules.’ (65)
- ‘The inability of democratic assemblies to carry out what seems to be a clear mandate of he people will inevitably cause dissatisfaction with the democratic institutions.’ (69)
- ‘Our point, however, is not that dictatorship must inevitably extirpate freedom but rather that planning leads to dictatorship because dictatorship is the most effective instrument of coercion and the enforcement of ideals and, as such, essential if central planning on a large scale is to be possible.’ (78)
- ‘A true ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, even if democratic in form, if it undertook centrally to direct the economic system, would probably destroy personal freedom as completely as any autocracy has ever done.’ (78)
- ‘The fashionable concentration on democracy as the main value threatened is not without danger. It is largely responsible for the misleading and unfounded belief that, so long as the ultimate source of power is the will of the majority, the power cannot be arbitrary.’ (79)
- ‘Nothing distinguishes more clearly conditions in a free country from those in a country under arbitrary government than the observance in the former of the great principles known as the Rule of Law.’ (80)
- ‘Money is one of the greatest instruments of freedom ever invented by man.’ (98)
- ‘Whether it is a question of changing his job or the place where he lives, of professions certain views or of spending his leisure in a particular manner, although sometimes the price he may have to pay for following his inclinations may be high, and to many appear to high, there are no absolute impediments, no dangers to bodily security and freedom, that confine him by brute force to the task and the environment to which a superior has assigned him.’ (113)
- ‘It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that nobody has complete power over us.’ (115)
- ‘The institution of private property is one of the main things that have given man that limited amount of free and equalness [sic] that Marx hoped to render infinite by abolishing this institution.’ Max Eastman (116)
- ‘While people will submit to suffering which may hit anyone, they will not so easily submit to suffering which is the result of the decision of authority.’ (118)
- ‘This is not a quibble about words. We face here a crucial issue which the similarity of the terms used is likely to conceal. While agreement on complete equality would answer all the problems of merit the planner must answer, the formula of the approach to greater equality answers practically none. Its content is hardly more definite than the phrases ‘common good’ or ‘social welfare’.’ (122)
- ‘What standards we have are derived from the competitive regime we have known and would necessarily disappear soon after the disappearance of competition.’ (122)
- ‘In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.’ Leon Trotsky (132)
- ‘Two kinds of security: the limited one, which can be achieved for all, and which is therefore no privilege but a legitimate object of desire; and absolute security, which in a free society cannot be achieved for all and which ought not to be given as a privilege – except in a few special instances such as that of the judges, where complete independence is of paramount importance.’ (132)
- ‘What is constantly being done is to grant this kind of security piecemeal, to this group and to that, with the result that for those who are left out in the cold the insecurity constantly increases. No wonder that in consequence the value attached to the privilege of security constantly increases, the demand for it becomes more and more urgent, until in the end no price, not even that of liberty appears to high.’ (137)
- ‘Some voluntary labor service on military lines might well be the best form for the state to provide the certainty of an opportunity for work and minimum income for all.’ (140)
- ‘Where to do one’s assigned duty is regarded as more laudable than to choose one’s own field of usefulness, where all pursuits that do not give a recognized place in the official hierarchy or a claim to a fixed income are regarded as inferior and even somewhat disreputable, it is too much to expect that many will long prefer freedom to security.’ (146)
- ‘Once things have gone so far, liberty indeed becomes almost a mockery, since it can be purchased only by the sacrifice of most of the good things of this earth.’ (146)
- ‘If the endeavors are to be successful and are not to destroy individual freedom, security must be provided outside the market and competition be left to function unobstructed.’ (146)
- ‘We must here return for a moment to the position which precedes the suppression of democratic institutions and the creation of a totalitarian regime. In this stage it is the general demand for quick and determined government action that is the dominating element in the situation, dissatisfaction with the slow and cumbersome course of democratic procedure which makes action for action’s sake the goal. It is then the man or the party who seems strong and resolute enough ‘to get things done’ who exercises the greatest appeal.’ (150)
- ‘The chance of imposing a totalitarian regime on a whole people depends on the leader’s first collecting round him a group which is prepared voluntarily to submit to that totalitarian discipline which they are to impose by force upon the rest.’ (151)
- ‘The contrast between the ‘we’ and the ‘they’, the common fight against those outside the group, seems to be an essential ingredient in any creed which will solidly knit together a group for common action.’ (153)
- ‘It is the old story of the alien race’s being admitted only to the less respected trades and then being hated still more for practicing them. The fact that German anti-Semitism and anti-capitalism spring from the same root is of great importance for the understanding of what has happened.’ (154)
- ‘If the ‘community’ of the state are prior to the individual, if they have ends of their own independent of and superior to those of the individuals, only those individuals who work for the same ends can be regarded as members of the community. It is a necessary consequence of this view that a person is respected only as a member of the group, that is, only if and in so far as he works for the recognized common ends, and that he derives his whole dignity only from this membership and not merely from being man.’ (156)
- ‘The desire of the individual to identify himself with a group is very frequently the result of a feeling of inferiority and that therefore his want will be satisfied only if membership of the group confers some superiority over outsiders… To act on behalf of a group seems to free people of many of the moral restraints which control their behavior as individuals within the group.’ (156-157)
- ‘In the existing world all outside contacts of a group are obstacles to their effectively planning the sphere in which they can attempt it.’ (157)
- ‘The principal that the end justifies the means in individualist ethics is regarded as the denial of all morals. In subjectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule; there is literally nothing which the consistent collectivist must not be prepared to do if it serves ‘the good of the whole’ because the [sic] good of the whole is to him the only criterion of what ought to be done.’ (161-162)
- ‘Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation most of these features of totalitarian regimes which horrify us follow of necessity.’ (164)
- ‘When German philosophers again and again represent the striving for personal happiness as itself immoral and only the fulfillment of an imposed duty as praiseworthy, they are perfectly sincere, however difficult this may be to understand for those who have been brought up in a different tradition.’ (164-165)
- ‘To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the same ends. It is essential that the people should come to regard them as their own end and this is, of course, brought about by the various forms of propaganda.’ (168)
- ‘If all the sources of current information are effectively under one single control, it is no longer a question of merely persuading the people of this or that. The skillful propagandist then has the power to mold their minds in any direction he chooses.’ (169)
- ‘The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those which they, or at least the best among them, have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before… And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words and change their meaning.’ (172)
- ‘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.’ (173)
- ‘If one has not one’s self experienced this process, it is difficult to appreciate the magnitude of this change of the meaning of words, the confusion which it causes, and the barriers to any rational discussion which it creates.’ (174)
- ‘The ‘Economic World War’ is the third great epoch of spiritual struggle in modern history. It is of equal importance with the Reformation and the bourgeois revolution of liberty. It is the struggle for the victory of the new forces born out of the advanced economic life of the nineteenth century: socialism and organization.’ (188)
- ‘When authooiy presents itself in the guide of organization, it develops charms fascinating enough to convert communities of free people into totalitarian states.’ The Times [ London
- ‘Probably it is true that the very magnitude of the outrages committed by the totalitarian governments, instead of increasing the fear that such a system might one day arise in more enlightened countries, has rather strengthened the assurance that it cannot happen here.’ (199)
- ‘Let us not forget that fifteen years ago the possibility of such a thing’s happening in Germany
- ‘That their blind enmity to profits should lead people to represent effortless fixed income as socially or ethically more desirable than profits, and to accept even monopoly to secure such a guaranteed income to, for example, railway bondholders, is one of the most extraordinary symptoms of the perversion of values which has taken place during the last generation.’ (216)
- ‘Even if railways, road and air transport, or the supply of gas and electricity were all inevitably monopolies, the consumer is unquestionably in a much stronger position so long as they remain separate monopolies than when they are ‘co-ordinated’ by a central control. Private monopoly is scarcely ever complete and even more rarely of long duration or able to disregard potential competition. But a state monopoly is always a state-protected monopoly… it means in most instances that a temporary monopoly is given the power to secure its position for all time – a power almost certain to be used.’ (216)
- ‘Those who argue that w have to an astounding degree learned to master the forces of nature but are sadly behind in making successful use of the possibilities of social collaboration are quite right so far as this statement goes. But they are mistaken when they carry the comparison further and argue that we must learn to master the forces of society in the same manner in which we have learned to master the forces of nature. This is not only the path to totalitarianism but the path to the destruction of our civilization and a certain way to block future progress. Those who demand it show by their very demands that they have not yet comprehended the extent to which the mere preservation of what we have so far achieved depends on the co-ordination of individual efforts by impersonal forces.’ (224-225)
- ‘However much one may wish a speedy return to a free economy, this cannot mean the removal at one stroke of most of the wartime restrictions. Nothing would discredit the system of free enterprise more than the acute, though probably short-lived, dislocation and instability such an attempt would produce. Perhaps no less important is that they should not, by shortsighted attempts to cure poverty by a redistribution instead of by an increase in our income, so depress large classes as to turn them into determined enemies of the existing political order.’ (229)
- ‘The one thing modern democracy will not bear without cracking is the necessity of a substantial lowering of the standards of living in peacetime or even prolonged stationeries of economic conditions.’ (230)
- ‘It is one of the most fatal illusions that, by substituting negotiations between states or organized groups for competition for markets, or for raw materials, international friction would be reduced. This would merely put a contest of force in the place of what can only metaphorically be called the ‘struggle’ of competition and would transfer to powerful and armed states, subject to no superior law, the rivalries which between individuals had to be decided without recourse to force.’ (241)
- ‘Though there are no doubt many people who honestly believe that if they were allowed to handle the job they would be able to settle all those problems justly and impartially, and who would be genuinely surprised to find suspicion and hatred turning against them, they would probably be the first to apply force when those whom they mean to benefit prove recalcitrant, and to show themselves quite ruthless in coercing people in what is presumed to be their own interests. What the dangerous idealists do not see is that where the assumption of a moral responsibility involves that one’s moral views should be force be made to prevail over those dominant in other communities, the assumption of such responsibility may place one in a position in which it becomes impossible to act morally.’ (249)
- ‘An international authority can be very just and contribute enormously to economic prosperity if it merely keeps order and creates conditions in which the people can develop their own life, but it is impossible to be just or to let people live their own life if the central authority doles out raw materials and allocated markets, if every spontaneous effort has to be ‘approved’ and nothing can be done without the sanction of the central authority.’ (250)
- ‘Nowhere has democracy ever worked well without a great measure of local self-government, providing a school of political training for the people at large as much as for their future leaders.’ (258)
- ‘The experience of the small countries lie Holland and Switzerland contains much from which even the most fortunate larger countries like Great Britain can learn. We shall all by the gainers if we can create a world fit for small states to live in.’ (258)
- ‘We shall never prevent the abuse of power if we are not prepared to limit power in a way which occasionally may also prevent its use for desirable purposes. The great opportunity we shall have at the end of this war is that the great victorious powers, by themselves first submitting to a system of rules which they have the power to enforce, may at the same time acquire the moral right to impose the same rules upon others. An international authority which effectively limits the power of the state over the individual will be one of the best safeguards of peace.’ (258-259)
- ‘We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.’ (262)
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