“All these people want is a chance for the future, a chance they will follow with a strict consequentness [sic]. They will resent pity, they will be suspicious of oversolicitousness. They have seen man from his most evil side, who can blame them for being suspicious? They will resent having somebody plan every little detail for them. And in all fairness, who can blame them for that? Have they not lived in the land of the dead and so what can be so terrifying about the land of the living?”

We walk the brink of racial suicide because we were smart enough to make atomic bombs and stupid enough to use them.

Most civilization is based on cowardice. It’s so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame.

The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion.

If you need something to worship, then worship life – all life, every last crawling bit of it! We’re all in this beauty together!

You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.

Our aim is to make the world more beautiful than it was when we came into it. It can be done. You can do it….Love yourself, and make your instrument sing about it.

When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.

The four cornerstones of the American political psyche are 1) emotion substituted for thought, 2) fear, 3) ignorance and 4) propaganda

We are ready to accept almost any explanation of the present crisis of our civilization except one: that the present state of the world may be the result of genuine error on our own part and that the pursuit of some of our most cherished ideals has apparently produced results utterly different from those which we expected.

For better or for worse, damn near every “serious” argument against socialism is a regurgitation of Hayek’s argument within this book. And for better or for worse, it has become the fight song of every reactionary. The book opens with a chapter titled “The Abandoned Road” that tells you everything you need to know: the “Europe of old” with its high minded ideals risks annihilation–specifically at the hands of socialism. The book is immensely disappointing, if only because I was expecting serious discussions of classical liberalism as libertarians interpret it.

Instead, I got overbearing love letters to ancient Europe, unwarranted alarm bells rung off about how socialism is an inherently non-European idea which will therefore undermine the project of liberty that only Europe came up with, and contradictory arguments about how some freedoms and liberties throughout history have been necessarily eliminated (the ability of power to exploit) but their reemergence in the modern era is their manifestation in perfect form (socialism is slavery because you are removing the freedom of a class of individuals to consign another class to “voluntary” servitude given abysmal material conditions).

Read Isaiah Berlin if you’re an unapologetic idealist but don’t want to read reactionary fan fiction. Berlin is far more perceptive and far more compelling than Hayek at every point when it comes to the 20th century, to the nature of freedom, to notions of justice and equality, to pretty much any idea that a libertarian would claim to be concerned with.

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