"When under the pretext of fraternity, the legal code imposes mutual sacrifices on the citizens, human nature is not thereby abrogated. Everyone will then direct his efforts toward contributing little to, and taking much from, the common fund of sacrifices. Now, is it the most unfortunate who gains from this struggle? Certainly not, but rather the most influential and calculating", The Law (1850)
"If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?", The Law (1850)
"Bureaucratic management is management of affairs which cannot be checked by economic calculation", Bureaucracy (1945)
"In public administration there is no market price for achievements", Bureaucracy (1945)
"In public administration there is no connexion between revenue and expenditure. The public services are spending money only; the insignificant income derived from special sources...is more or less accidental. The revenue derived from customs and taxes is not 'produced' by the administrative apparatus. Its source is the law, not the activities of the customs officers and tax collectors. It is not the merit of a collector of internal revenue that the residents of his district are richer and pay higher taxes than those of another district", Bureaucracy (1945)
"Bureaucratic management is management bound to comply with detailed rules and regulations fixed by the authority of a superior body. The task of the bureaucrat is to perform what these rules and regulations order him to do. His discretion to act according to his own best conviction is seriously restricted by them", Bureaucracy (1945)
"What characterizes our time is the expansion of the sphere of government interference with business and with many other items of the citizenry's affairs. And this results in a substitution of bureaucratic management for profit management", Bureaucracy (1945)
"There is a field, namely, the handling of the apparatus of government, in which bureaucratic methods are required by necessity. What many people nowadays consider an evil is not bureaucracy as such, but the expansion of the sphere in which bureaucratic management is applied. This expansion is the unavoidable consequence of the progressive restriction of the individual citizen's freedom, of the inherent trend of present-day economic and social policies toward the substitution of government control for private initiative", Bureaucracy (1945)
"It is a euphemism to call a government in which the rulers are free to do whatever they themselves believe best serves the common weal a welfare state, and to contrast it with the state in which the administration is bound by law and the citizens can make good in a court of law their rights against illegal encroachments of the authorities. This so-called welfare state is in fact the tyranny of the rulers", Bureaucracy (1945)
"The only alternative to the determination of market prices by the choices of all consumers is the determination of values by the judgment of some small groups of men, no less liable to error and frustration than the majority, notwithstanding the fact that they are called 'authority'. No matter how the values of consumers' goods are determined, whether they are fixed by a dictatorial decision or by the choices of all consumers - the whole people - values are always relative, subjective, and human, never absolute, objective, and divine", Bureaucracy (1945)