Progress

It is not true that human conditions must always improve, and that a relapse into very unsatisfactory modes of life, penury and barbarism is impossible.

Planning for Freedom, p. 177

There is no evidence that social evolution must move steadily upwards in a straight line. Social standstill and social retrogression are historical facts which we cannot ignore. World history is the graveyard of dead civilizations.

Socialism, p. 275

What is called economic progress is the joint effect of the activities of the three progressive groups . . . the savers, the scientist-inventors, and the entrepreneurs, operating in a market economy.

The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, p. 127

Whoever preaches the return to simple forms of the economic organization of society ought to keep in mind that only our type of economic system offers the possibility of supporting in the style to which we have become accustomed today the number of people who now populate the earth. A return to the Middle Ages means the extermination of many hundreds of millions of people.

Liberalism, p. 189

It is true that all this straining and struggling to increase their standard of living does not make men any happier. Nevertheless, it is in the nature of man continually to strive for an improvement in his material condition. If he is forbidden the satisfaction of this aspiration, he becomes dull and brutish. The masses will not listen to exhortations to be moderate and contented; it may be that the philosophers who preach such admonitions are laboring under a serious self-delusion. If one tells people that their fathers had it much worse, they answer that they do not know why they should not have it still better.

Liberalism, p. 190

Men always strive for an improvement in their conditions and always will. This is man’s inescapable destiny.

Liberalism, p. 190