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.
Interpretation
True freedom encompasses the rights to pursue unique individual choices, regardless of their popularity or common usage.
In this quote, Friedrich August Von Hayek argues that the true value of freedom lies not in its widespread application but in the allowance for individual expression. Even if a particular freedom is only exercised by a rare individual, it can have profound societal benefits, illustrating that the significance of freedom extends beyond mere collective usage and is essential for innovation and progress.
In practice
In a speech about civil liberties, one might say: 'As Friedrich August Von Hayek noted, the importance of freedom is not determined by its use by the majority.'
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 younger generation of today has grown up in a world in which in school and press the spirit of commercial enterprise has been represented as disreputable and the making of profit as immoral, where to employ a hundred people is represented as exploitation but to command the same number as honorable.
Without God man has no reference point to define himself.
Where globalization means, as it so often does, that the rich and powerful now have new means to further enrich and empower themselves at the cost of the poorer and weaker, we have a responsibility to protest in the name of universal freedom.
I know ours is a world made by men for men, their dictatorship is so ancient it even extends to language.
So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence – not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be – its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of injury, unable to summon the face of their violator.
The corruption of the best things gives rise to the worst.
What is born will die, What has been gathered will be dispersed, What has been accumulated will be exhausted, What has been built up will collapse, And what has been high will be brought low.
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