Reality

Life consists in adjusting oneself to actual conditions and in taking account of things as they really are, not as one would wish them to be.

Omnipotent Government, p. 13

Every enterprise has to adapt itself to the given situation, and not reckon on the situation it would like to be given.

Epistemological Problems of Economics, p. 229

One of the fundamental facts of all social life, which all reformers must take into account, is that men have their own thoughts and their own wills.

Socialism, p. 183

The cognizance of reality is a sad experience. It teaches the limits on the satisfaction of one’s wishes. Only reluctantly does man resign himself to the insight that there are things, viz., the whole complex of all causal relations between events, which wishful thinking cannot alter.

Human Action, p. 858; p. 862

We must see conditions as they really are, not as we want them to be.

Omnipotent Government, p. 259

Most men endure the sacrifice of the intellect more easily than the sacrifice of their daydreams. They cannot bear that their utopias should run aground on the unalterable necessities of human existence. What they yearn for is another reality different from the one given in this world. . . . They wish to be free of a universe of whose order they do not approve.

Epistemological Problems of Economics, p. 200