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"'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded – and once they are suspended it is not difficult for anyone who has assumed emergency powers to see to it that the emergency will persist."

— Hayek, Friedrich event 1973

From Law, Legislation and Liberty (p. 124)

Context: Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 3: The Political Order of a Free People (University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 124. A quote sometimes misattributed to The Road to Serfdom (1944), where this passage does not appear; the actual 1944 text contains no discussion of "emergency"/"emergencies" at all. This is the correctly sourced original, from Hayek's later three-volume work.

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