'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.
I think that when in doubt about the truth of an issue, it's safer and in better taste to select the least numerous of the adversaries.
Let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarcy, that in America the law is King. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.
Every time somebody speaks of my honesty, there is someone who quivers inside me.
America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity - the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.
One must confront vague ideas with clear images.
In this breaking-through, I receive that God and I are one. Then I am what I was, and then I neither diminish nor increase, for I am then an immovable cause that moves all things.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.