Top 100 Ludwig Von Mises Quotes
#1. the individual is today no longer primarily a citizen, but a party member.
Ludwig Von Mises
#3. Freedom is indivisible. As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop.
Ludwig Von Mises
#4. Reason is the main resource of man in his struggle for survival.
Ludwig Von Mises
#5. The governments alone are responsible for the spread of the superstitious awe with which the common man looks upon every bit of paper upon which the treasury or agencies which it controls have printed the magical words legal tender.
Ludwig Von Mises
#6. Sovereignty must not be used for inflicting harm on anyone, whether citizen or foreigner.
Ludwig Von Mises
#7. The characteristic mark of economic history under capitalism is unceasing economic progress, a steady increase in the quantity of capital goods available, and a continuous trend toward an improvement in the general standard of living.
Ludwig Von Mises
#8. The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion.
Ludwig Von Mises
#9. It is untrue that some are poor because others are rich. If an order of society in which incomes were equal replaced the capitalist order, everyone would become poorer.
Ludwig Von Mises
#10. Servile labour disappeared because it could not stand the competition of free labour; its un-profitability sealed its doom in the market economy.
Ludwig Von Mises
#11. No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want.
Ludwig Von Mises
#12. You call it a 'loophole' when the government still allows you some freedom.
Ludwig Von Mises
#13. Stable government requires the free consent of those ruled. Tyranny, even the tyranny of benevolent despots, cannot bring lasting peace and prosperity. There
Ludwig Von Mises
#14. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.
Ludwig Von Mises
#15. The attainment of the economic aims of man presupposes peace.
Ludwig Von Mises
#16. Each epoch has found in the Gospels what it sought to find there, and has overlooked what it wished to overlook.
Ludwig Von Mises
#18. The advocates of public control cannot do without inflation. They need it in order to finance their policy of reckless spending and of lavishly subsidizing and bribing the voters.
Ludwig Von Mises
#19. Keynes did not teach us how to perform the miracle of turning a stone into bread, but the not at all miraculous procedure of eating the seed corn.
Ludwig Von Mises
#20. Competition on the market aims at assigning to every individual that function in the social system in which he can render to all his fellow men the most valuable of the services he is able to perform.
Ludwig Von Mises
#21. The genuine history of mankind is the history of ideas. It is
ideas that distinguish man from all other beings. Ideas
engender social institutions, political changes, technologi-
cal methods of production, and all that is called economic
conditions.
Ludwig Von Mises
#22. The people of the United States are more prosperous ... because their government embarked later than other governments ... upon the policy of obstructing business
Ludwig Von Mises
#23. It suffices here to say that the planned economy which the advocates of dictatorship wish to set up is precisely as socialistic as the Socialism propagated by the self-styled Social Democrats.
Ludwig Von Mises
#25. In a society of free men the preservation of life and health are ends, not means. They do not enter into any process of accounting means.
Ludwig Von Mises
#27. It is the worst of all superstitions to assume that the epistemological characteristics of one branch of knowledge must necessarily be applicable to any other branch.
Ludwig Von Mises
#28. The word "Capitalism" expresses, for our age, the sum of all evil. Even the opponents of Socialism are dominated by socialist ideas.
Ludwig Von Mises
#29. In the case of money, subjective use-value and subjective exchange-value coincide. Both are derived from objective exchange-value, for money has no utility other than that arising from the possibility of obtaining other economic goods in exchange for it.
Ludwig Von Mises
#30. The egalitarian doctrine is manifestly contrary to all the facts established by biology and by history. Only fanatical partisans of this theory can contend that what distinguishes the genius from the dullard is entirely the effect of postnatal influences.
Ludwig Von Mises
#31. It is in the nature of every application of violence that it tends toward a transgression of the limit within which it is tolerated and viewed as legitimate.
Ludwig Von Mises
#32. Government is the only institution that can take a valuable commodity like paper, and make it worthless by applying ink.
Ludwig Von Mises
#33. An anti-something movement displays a purely negative attitude. It has no chance whatever to succeed. Its passionate diatribes virtually advertise the program they attack. People must fight for something that they want to achieve, not simply reject an evil, however bad it may be.
Ludwig Von Mises
#34. Action based on reason, action therefore which is only to be understood by reason, knows only one end, the greatest pleasure of the acting individual.
Ludwig Von Mises
#35. The boom squanders through malinvestment scarce factors of production and reduces the stock available through overconsumption; its alleged blessings are paid for by impoverishment.
Ludwig Von Mises
#36. If some peoples pretend that history or geography gives them the right to subjugate other races, nations, or peoples, there can be no peace.
Ludwig Von Mises
#37. It is not conclusive proof of a doctrine's correctness that its adversaries use the police, the hangman, and violent mobs to fight it. But it is a proof of the fact that those taking recourse to violent oppression are in their subconscious convinced of the untenability of their own doctrines.
Ludwig Von Mises
#38. Private property creates for the individual a sphere in which he is free of the state. It sets limits to the operation of the authoritarian will.
Ludwig Von Mises
#39. Scientific criticism has no nobler task than to shatter false beliefs.
Ludwig Von Mises
#40. Capitalism needs neither propaganda nor apostles. Its achievements speak for themselves. Capitalism delivers the goods.
Ludwig Von Mises
#41. Government is a guarantor of liberty and is compatible with liberty only if its range is adequately restricted to the preservation of what is called economic freedom.
Ludwig Von Mises
#42. True, man cannot escape death. But for the present he is alive; and life, not death, takes hold of him ... It is mans innate nature that he seeks to preserve and to strengthen his life, that he is discontented and aims at removing uneasiness, that he is in search of what may be called happiness.
Ludwig Von Mises
#43. On the unhampered market there prevails an irresistible tendency to employ every factor of production for the best possible satisfaction of the most urgent needs of the consumers. If the government interfered with this process, it can only impair satisfaction; it can never improve it.
Ludwig Von Mises
#44. What is needed for a sound expansion of production is additional capital goods, not money or fiduciary media. The credit expansion is built on the sands of banknotes and deposits. It must collapse.
Ludwig Von Mises
#45. In the socialist commonwealth every economic change becomes an undertaking whose success can be neither appraised in advance nor later retrospectively determined. There is only groping in the dark. Socialism is the abolition of rational economy.
Ludwig Von Mises
#46. No private enterprise will ever fall prey to bureaucratic methods of management if it is operated with the sole aim of making profit.
Ludwig Von Mises
#47. The agents of etatism have certainly not been lacking in zeal and energy. But, for all this, economic affairs cannot be kept going by magistrates and policemen.
Ludwig Von Mises
#48. The standard of living of the common man is higher in those countries which have the greatest number of wealthy entrepreneurs.
Ludwig Von Mises
#49. The aim of all struggles for liberty is to keep in bounds the armed defenders of peace, the governors and their constables. The political concept of the individual's freedom means: freedom from arbitrary action on the part of the police power.
Ludwig Von Mises
#50. German Marxian's coined the dictum: If socialism is against human nature, then human nature must be changed.
Ludwig Von Mises
#51. Socialism is the expression of the principle of violence crying from the workers' soul, just as Imperialism is the principle of violence speaking from the soul of the official and the soldier.
Ludwig Von Mises
#52. But even a victory of planning will not mean the end of history. Atrocious wars among the candidates for the supreme office will break out. Totalitarianism may wipe out civilization, even the whole of the human race. Then, of course, history will have come to its end too.
Ludwig Von Mises
#53. Nobody is in a position to decree what should make a fellow man happier.
Ludwig Von Mises
#54. There is no remedy for the inefficiency of public management.
Ludwig Von Mises
#55. The moneyprice of any commodity in any place, under the assumption of completely unrestricted exchange and disregarding the differences arising from the time taken in transit, must be the same as the price at any other place, augmented or diminished by the money-cost of transport.
Ludwig Von Mises
#57. A nation, therefore, has no right to say to a province: You belong to me, I want to take you. A province consists of its inhabitants. If anybody has a right to be heard in this case it is these inhabitants. Boundary disputes should be settled by plebiscite.
Ludwig Von Mises
#58. What people today call inflation is not inflation, i.e., the increase in the quantity of money and money substitutes, but the general rise in commodity prices and wage rates which is the inevitable consequence of inflation.
Ludwig Von Mises
#59. Historical knowledge is indispensable for those who want to build a better world
Ludwig Von Mises
#60. Spiritual movements are revolts of thought against inertia, of the few against the many; of those who because they are strong in spirit are strongest alone against those who can express themselves only in the mass and the mob, and who are significant only because they are numerous.
Ludwig Von Mises
#61. Innovation is the whim of an elite before it becomes a need of the public.
Ludwig Von Mises
#62. At eighty-eight how do you feel when getting up in the morning? ... Amazed!
Ludwig Von Mises
#63. Liberalism must be intolerant of every sort of intolerance.
Ludwig Von Mises
#64. Capitalists have the tendency to move toward those countries in which there is plenty of labor available and at which labor is reasonable. And by the fact that they bring capital into these countries, they bring about a trend toward higher wage rates.
Ludwig Von Mises
#65. As soon as the economic freedom which the market economy grants to its members is removed, all political liberties and bills of rights become humbug.
Ludwig Von Mises
#66. A country becomes more prosperous in proportion to the rise in the invested capital unit per unit of its population.
Ludwig Von Mises
#67. The development of capitalism consists in everyone having the right to serve the consumer better or more cheaply.
Ludwig Von Mises
#68. Laissez faire does not mean: let soulless mechanical forces operate. It means: let individuals choose how they want to cooperate in the social division of labor and let them determine what the entrepreneurs should produce.
Ludwig Von Mises
#69. In relation to the immense sacrifices that the state demands of the individual through the blood tax, it seems rather incidental whether it compensates the soldier more or less abundantly for the loss of time that he suffers from his military-service obligation.
Ludwig Von Mises
#70. He who disdains the fall in infant mortality and the gradual disappearance of famines and plagues may cast the first stone upon the materialism of the economists.
Ludwig Von Mises
#71. What governments call international monetary cooperation is concerted action for the sake of credit expansion.
Ludwig Von Mises
#72. If the government objects to monopoly prices for new inventions, it should stop granting patents.
Ludwig Von Mises
#73. All present-day governments are fanatically committed to an easy money policy.
Ludwig Von Mises
#74. The function of money is to facilitate the business of the market by acting as a common medium of exchange.
Ludwig Von Mises
#75. In a capitalist society one can hold on to one's fortune only if one perpetually acquires it anew by investing it wisely.
Ludwig Von Mises
#76. Every type of socialism is unworkable because economic calculation is impossible in a socialist community.
Ludwig Von Mises
#77. If it is unnecessary to adjust the amount of expenditure to the means available, there is no limit to the spending of the great god State.
Ludwig Von Mises
#78. Every specific tax, as well as the nation's whole tax system, becomes self-defeating above a certain height of the rates.
Ludwig Von Mises
#79. All people, however fanatical they may be in their zeal to disparage and to fight capitalism, implicitly pay homage to it by passionately clamoring for the products it turns out
Ludwig Von Mises
#80. If Capitalism improves the economic position all round, it is of secondary importance that it does not raise all to the same level. A social order is not bad simply because it helps one more than the other.
Ludwig Von Mises
#81. The characteristic feature of capitalism that distinguishes it from pre-capitalist methods of production was its new principle of marketing. Capitalism is not simply mass production, but mass production to satisfy the needs of the masses.
Ludwig Von Mises
#82. There is no western, capitalistic country in which the conditions of the masses have not improved in an unprecedented way.
Ludwig Von Mises
#83. The truth is that the government cannot give if it does not take from somebody ... It is not in the power of the government to make everybody more prosperous.
Ludwig Von Mises
#84. It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realize that it was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the part of governments.
Ludwig Von Mises
#85. What is lacking to the underdeveloped nations is not knowledge, but capital.
Ludwig Von Mises
#86. Only one thing can conquer war - that attitude of mind which can see nothing in war but destruction and annihilation.
Ludwig Von Mises
#87. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.
Ludwig Von Mises
#88. The public firm can nowhere maintain itself in free competition with the private firm; it is possible today only where it has a monopoly that excludes competition. Even that alone is evidence of its lesser economic productivity.
Ludwig Von Mises
#90. Changes in human conditions are brought about by the pioneering of the cleverest and most energetic men. They take the lead and the rest of mankind follows them little by little.
Ludwig Von Mises
#91. Whoever wants peace among nations must seek to limit the state and its influence most strictly.
Ludwig Von Mises
#92. Modern society, based as it is on the division of labor, can be preserved only under conditions of lasting peace.
Ludwig Von Mises
#93. Anticapitalism can maintain itself in existence only by sponging on capitalism.
Ludwig Von Mises
#95. For hundreds, even thousands, of years, people completely failed to see that variations in the objective exchange-value of money could be induced by monetary factors. They tried to explain all variations of prices exclusively from the commodity side.
Ludwig Von Mises
#96. This dilettantish inability to comprehend the essential issues of the conduct of production affairs is not only manifested in the writings of Marx and Engels. It permeates no less the contributions of contemporary pseudo-economics.
Ludwig Von Mises
#97. The biological equipment of a man rigidly restricts the field in which he can serve.
Ludwig Von Mises
#98. Tyranny is the political corollary of socialism, as representative government is the political corollary of the market economy.
Ludwig Von Mises
#99. The mark of the creative mind is that it defies a part of what it has learned.
Ludwig Von Mises
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