The Road to Serfdom (Routledge, 2001 edition)

Their wordsWe can rely on voluntary agreement to guide the action of the state only so long as it is confined to spheres where agreement exists.

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Their wordsIt is important not to confuse opposition against this kind of planning with a dogmatic laissez-faire attitude.

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Their wordsIt is the price of democracy that the possibilities of conscious control are restricted to the fields where true agreement exists, and that in some fields things must be left to chance.

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Their wordsThe liberal argument is in favour of making the best possible use of the forces of competition as a means of co-ordinating human efforts, not an argument for leaving things just as they are.

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Their wordsOur 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.

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Their wordsNothing 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.

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Their wordsIndeed, the Rule of Law, more than the rule of contract, should probably be regarded as the true opposite of the rule of status.

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Their wordsRule of Law was consciously evolved only during the liberal age and is one of its greatest achievements, not only as a safeguard but as the legal embodiment of freedom.

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Their wordsSo long as we can freely dispose over our income and all our possessions, economic loss will always deprive us only of what we regard as the least important of the desires we were able to satisfy.

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Their wordsIf the individuals are to be able to use their knowledge effectively in making plans, they must be able to predict actions of the state which may affect these plans.

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Their wordsThe authority directing all economic activity would control not merely the part of our lives which is concerned with inferior things; it would control the allocation of the limited means for all our ends.

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Their wordsOur freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes we can turn to another.

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Their wordsBut if we face a monopolist we are at his mercy. And an authority directing the whole economic system would be the most powerful monopolist conceivable.

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Their wordsWhat our generation has forgotten is that 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.

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Their wordsIt is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that nobody has complete power over us, that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves.

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Their wordsThere is no reason why in a society that has reached the general level of wealth which ours has attained, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom.

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Their wordsBut if these endeavours are to be successful and not to destroy individual freedom, security must be provided outside the market and competition be left to function unobstructed.

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Their wordsIt is for this reason that the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful in a society tending towards totalitarianism.

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Their wordsThough we may sometimes be forced to choose between different evils they remain evils.

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Their wordsIn the same way there can be no international law without a power to enforce it.

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Their wordsWhat is essential to make it serve its function as the prime mover of intellectual progress is not that everybody may be able to think or write anything, but that any cause or idea may be argued by somebody.

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Their wordsIt was men's submission to the impersonal forces of the market that in the past has made possible the growth of a civilisation which without this could not have developed

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Their wordsThe guiding principle, that a policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy, remains as true to-day as it was in the nineteenth century.

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