… is from page 24 of F. A. Hayek’s 1948 collection, Individualism and Economic Order; in particular, it’s from Hayek’s wisdom-packed 1945 lecture “Individualism: True and False”:
Man in a complex society can have no choice but between adjusting himself to what to him must seem the blind forces of the social process and obeying the orders of a superior. So long as he knows only the hard discipline of the market, he may well think the direction by some other intelligent human brain preferable; but, when he tries it, he soon discovers that the former still leaves him at least some choice, while the latter leaves him none, and that it is better to have a choice between several unpleasant alternatives than being coerced into one.
