Before we can try to remould society intelligently, we must understand its functioning; we must realise that, even when we believe that we understand it, we may be mistaken. What we must learn to understand is that human civilisation has a life of its own, that all our efforts to improve things must operate within a working whole which we cannot entirely control, and the operation of whose forces we can hope merely to facilitate and assist so far as we can understand them.

Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong.

However human, envy is certainly not one of the sources of discontent that a free society can eliminate. It is probably one of the essential conditions for the…

The case for individual freedom rests chiefly on the recognition of the inevitable and universal ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors …

If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential …

Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.

...no bloody or unbloody change of society can eradicate the evil in man: as long as there will be men, there will be malice, envy and hatred, and hence there …