'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that crises can lead to the infringement of personal freedoms.
Friedrich August Von Hayek highlights how governments and authorities often use emergencies as justification to limit individual liberties. Throughout history, it has been observed that in times of crisis, the need for security can lead to the erosion of freedoms that citizens typically enjoy, raising concerns about the balance between security and liberty.
In practice
In a speech about civil liberties, one might cite this quote to discuss the importance of preserving freedoms during national emergencies.
What 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. 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, that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves.
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
It is only because the majority opinion will always be opposed by some that our knowledge and understanding progress... it is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.
Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion.
It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.
The importance of our being free to do a particular thing has nothing to do with the question of whether we or the majority are ever likely to make use of that particular possibility. To grant no more freedom than all can exercise would be to misconceive its function completely. The freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use.
The future of the world depends on how well we meet it.
It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.
To be is to be perceived (Esse est percipi)." Or, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
O sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams That bring to my remembrance from what state I fell, how glorious once above thy sphere.
Corporations aren't people. They have no brains, no consciences, no capacity for intent or guilt.
As soon as I reach any town, I talk to the shoe-shine boys or the barbers or the people in the restaurants, because it's Mr. Joe Doakes who is very close to reality.
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