Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they … - F.A. Hayek

In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority.

The dispute about socialism has thus become largely a dispute about means and not about ends — although the question whether the different ends of socialism can be simultaneously achieved is also involved.

Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, and responsibility for the arrangement of our own life according to our own conscience, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily recreated in the free decision of the individual. Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one's own conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to bear the consequences of one's own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name.

Tradition is not good simply because it is tradition. It is for what it has given us and only so long as an alternative does not prove by its effect that it is better.