'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.
As the different streams, having their sources in different places, all mingle their water in the sea; O Lord, so the different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee.
When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.
At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.
As long as our civilisation keeps trundling along generally forwards, then there is the possibility of a future where ethnicity is merely an interesting badge, not a uniform you can't take off.
When you look at yourself from a universal standpoint, something inside always reminds or informs you that there are bigger and better things to worry about.
Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.