Hayek Quotes

• What's the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today? What I tried to leave my students with is the view that the invisible hand is more powerful than the hidden hand. Things will happen in well-organized efforts without direction, controls, plans. That's the consensus among economists. That's the Hayek legacy.

  Lawrence Summers

  Powerful, Views, Hands

  "The Commanding Heights". Book by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, 1998.

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• Since the idea that modification of synaptic function can provide a basis for memory arose shortly after the first anatomical description of the synapse a number of models (Hebb 1949 . . Hayek 1952 . . Kendel 1981) have been proposed in which various cognitive activities are represented by combinations of the firing patterns of individual neurons.

  Gerald Edelman

  Memories, Ideas, Numbers

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• Hayek is amongst the top 2-3 of the all the people who ever influenced me.

  Ronald Reagan

  People

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• Hayek was making us think of the productive process as a process in time, inputs coming before outputs.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Time, Thinking, Input

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• When I reviewed Hayek's book, The Pure Theory of Capital, it is my sincere conviction that this work contains some of the most penetrating thoughts on the subject that have ever been published.

  Fritz Machlup

  Book, Sincere, Conviction

  Fritz Machlup (2013). “Essays on Hayek”, p.50, Routledge

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• Even philosophies who have denounced pseudosciences like psychoanalysis, have condoned pseudoscientific economic theories like neoclassical microeconomics. It is far safer and easier to criticize Freud and Jung than to criticize Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, because the latter are backed by political movements whereas the former are not.

  Mario Bunge

  Philosophy, Political, Pseudoscience

  Source: deutsche-denker.de

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• Powerful government tends to draw into it people with bloated egos, people who think they know more than everyone else and have little hesitance in coercing their fellow man. Or as Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek said, "in government, the scum rises to the top".

  Walter E. Williams

  Powerful, Men, Thinking

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• The first proponent of cortical memory networks on a major scale was neither a neuroscientist nor a computer scientist but .. a Viennes economist: Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992). A man of exceptionally broad knowledge and profound insight into the operation of complex systems, Hayek applied such insight with remarkable success to economics (Nobel Prize, 1974), sociology, political science, jurisprudence, evolutionary theory, psychology, and brain science (Hayek, 1952).

  Joaquin Fuster

  Memories, Men, Profound

  "Memory in the Cerebral Cortex: An Empirical Approach to Neural Networks in the Human and Nonhuman Primate". Book by Joaquin M. Fuster, 1995.

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• Hayek made a quite fruitful suggestion, made contemporaneously by the psychologist Donald Hebb, that whatever kind of encounter the sensory system has with the world, a corresponding event between a particular cell in the brain and some other cell carrying the information from the outside word must result in reinforcement of the connection between those cells. These day, this is known as a Hebbian synapse, but von Hayek quite independently came upon the idea. I think the essence of his analysis still remains with us.

  Gerald Edelman

  Thinking, Cells, Essence

  "Through a Computer Darkly: Group Selection and Higher Brain Function". Gerald Edelman, "Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences", Volume 36, No. 1 (p. 25), www.jstor.org. October 1982.

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• I had a dream that Britney Spears rubbed her breasts in my face and Jennifer Lopez gave me head while Salma Hayek sucked my toes and the Olsen twins videotaped everything. I would have kept dreaming it, too, if I hadn't set off the smoke detector.

  Donald Fagen

  Dream, Sex, Faces

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• Most theoretical work since the proposals of Hebb (1949) and Hayek (1952) has relied upon particular forms of dependent synaptic rules in which either pre- or postsynaptic change is contingent upon closely occurring events in both neurons taking part in the synapse.

  Gerald Edelman

  Events, Neurons, Proposal

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• Half the time I read Hayek's The Sensory Order with amazement at the extent of his reading and comprehension. He is right most of the time.

  Edwin Boring

  Reading, Order, Half

  "Elementist Going Up". The Scientific Monthly, p. 183, March 1953.

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• Hayek, in my view, is the leading economic thinker of the 20th century.

  Vernon L. Smith

  Views, Economic, Century

  "Reflections on Human Action after 50 years". Cato Journal, Vol. 9, No. 2, 1999.

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• The government can always rescue the markets or interfere with contract law whenever it deems convenient with little or no apparent cost. (Investors believe this now and, worse still, the government believes it as well. We are probably doomed to a lasting legacy of government tampering with financial markets and the economy, which is likely to create the mother of all moral hazards. The government is blissfully unaware of the wisdom of Friedrich Hayek: "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.")

  Seth Klarman

  Mother, Believe, Men

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• Hebb place the Law of Effect at the synaptic level by proposing a correlation model of synaptic modification similar to that of Hayek (1952). This work was seminal in providing a basis for many subsequent theoretical studies . .

  Gerald Edelman

  Law, Levels, Study

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• The main reasons for dwelling .. on Hayek's model is simply that it has certain properties, absent from most others, that conform exceptionally well to recent neurobiological evidence on memory and that make it particularly suited to the current discourse.

  Joaquin Fuster

  Memories, Dwelling, Reason

  "Memory in the Cerebral Cortex: An Empirical Approach to Neural Networks in the Human and Nonhuman Primate". Book by Joaquin M. Fuster, 1995.

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• For Dicey, writing in 1885, and for me reading him some seventy years later, the rule of law still had a very English, or at least Anglo-Saxon, feel to it. It was later, through Hayek's masterpieces "The Constitution of Liberty" and "Law, Legislation and Liberty" that I really came to think this principle as having wider application.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Reading, Writing, Thinking

  "The Path to Power". Book by Margaret Thatcher, 1995.

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• As a result of the efforts of Hayek .. and the many others who share his general outlook, the idea of a centrally planned and centrally administered economy, so popular in the 1930s and early 1940s, has been discredited.

  Irving Kristol

  Ideas, Effort, Economy

  Irving Kristol (1999). “Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea”, Ivan R Dee

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• If the central contest of the twentieth century has pitted capitalism against socialism, then F. A. Hayek has been its central figure. He helped us to understand why capitalism won by a knockout. It was Hayek who elaborated the basic argument demonstrating that central planning was nothing else but an impoverishing fantasy.

  Kenneth Minogue

  Planning, Fantasy, Argument

  "Giants Refreshed II: The Escape from Serfdom: Friedrich von Hayek and the Restoration of Liberty" in Times Literary Supplement ( p. 11), January 14, 2000.

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• Because I also write, I really admire Latinas who are creating content. That's the next step. We can talk about seeing more Latinas on TV all day long, but it's about what we can do to make that happen. Women like Eva Longoria, Sofía Vergara, Jennifer Lopez, and Salma Hayek are producing a lot of great shows that feature Latinas. Those are the women who inspire me because they're not just acting; they're creating for the future.

  Chrissie Fit

  Writing, Creating, Long

  "Meet Chrissie Fit: The Latina Actress Twirling Through Hollywood - Literally". Interview with Lyndsay Green, www.glamour.com. July 30, 2015.

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• Regarding social order, [Francis] Fukuyama writes, "The systematic study of how order, and thus social capital, can emerge in spontaneous and decentralized fashion is one of the most important intellectual developments of the late twentieth century." He correctly attributes the modern origins of this argument to F. A. Hayek, whose pioneering contributions to cognitive science, the study of cultural evolution, and the dynamics of social change put him in the forefront of the most creative scholars of the 20th century.

  Douglass North

  Fashion, Writing, Order

  "Orders of the Day" by Douglass North, reason.com. November 1999.

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• Friedrich Hayek, who died on March 23, 1992 at age 92, was arguably the greatest social scientist of the twentieth century. By the time of his death, his fundamental way of thought had supplanted the system of John Maynard Keynes - his chief intellectual rival of the century - in the battle since the 1930s for the minds of economists and the policies of governments.

  Julian Simon

  Government, Mind, Intellectual

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• Friedrich Hayek .. seems to have been the first to postulate what is the core of this paper, namely, the idea of memory and perception represented in widely distributed networks of interconnected cortical cells. Subsequently this idea has received theoretical support, however tangential, from the fields of cognitive psychology, connectionism and artificial intelligence. Empirically, it is well supported by the physiological study and neuroimaging of working memory.

  Joaquin Fuster

  Memories, Cells, Ideas

  "Network Memory". Trends in Neuroscience, Vol. 20, Issue 10, October 1997.

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• Ever read any [Friedrich] Hayek? He's great. The Road To Serfdom is like... I'm not a big political-science reader, but I actually dog-eared my copy. I ended up going back through it and writing a précis, I was so impressed by this book. It's all about what happens when government tries to make everything right.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Dog, Book, Writing

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• It is truly amazing that, with much less neuroscientific knowledge available, Hayek's model comes closer, in some respects, to being neurophysiologically verifiable than those models developed 50 to 60 years after his.

  Joaquin Fuster

  Years, Models, Available

  "Memory in the Cerebral Cortex: An Empirical Approach to Neural Networks in the Human and Nonhuman Primate". Book by Joaquin M. Fuster, 1995.

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