Great Throughts Treasury

"Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one’s conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to beat the consequences of one’s own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name."

"Liberty and responsibility are inseparable."

"It is… the essence of the demand for equality before the law that people should be treated alike in spite of the fact that they are different."

"Outside the sphere of individual responsibility there is neither goodness or badness… Only where we ourselves are responsible for our own interests and are free to sacrifice them has our decision moral value."

"'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded. "

"Our moral traditions developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product. "

"I have arrived at the conviction that the neglect by economists to discuss seriously what is really the crucial problem of our time is due to a certain timidity about soiling their hands by going from purely scientific questions into value questions. "

"The progress of the natural sciences in modern times has of course so much exceeded all expectations that any suggestion that there may be some limits to it is bound to arouse suspicion. "

"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. "

"Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom."

"Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality - an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order."

"If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion. "

"We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice. "

"To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm."

"We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish. "

"There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal."