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" "The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed
beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to
establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which
may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the
hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other
principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every
single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress
upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and
harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably,
and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.
Friedrich August von Hayek CH (8 May 1899 – 23 March 1992) was an Austrian, later British, economist and philosopher best known for his defense of classical liberalism. In 1974, Hayek shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (with Gunnar Myrdal) for his "pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and … penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena". (Nobel Memorial Prize, 1974)
Biography information from Wikiquote
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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.