Top 100 Von Mises Quotes
#1. Ludwig von Mises referred to Ayn Rand as 'the most courageous man in America.' If that doesn't say it all about the economist's man-centric frame of reference, I don't know what does.
Ilana Mercer
#2. As Ludwig von Mises conclusively demonstrated in 1912, money does not and cannot originate by order of the State or by some sort of social contract agreed upon by all citizens; it must always originate in the processes of the free market.
Murray Rothbard
#3. Professor von Mises has a splendid analytical mind and an admirable passion for liberty; but as a student of human nature he is worse than null and as a debater he is of Hyde Park standard.
Ludwig Von Mises
#4. The proposition that economist Ludwig von Mises was a feminist is an apodictic impossibility.
Ilana Mercer
#5. One must rather ask how much could be produced if competition among producers were abolished.
Ludwig Von Mises
#6. the individual is today no longer primarily a citizen, but a party member.
Ludwig Von Mises
#8. Governments, political parties, pressure groups, and the bureaucrats of the educational hierarchy think they can avoid the inevitable consequences of unsuitable measures by boycotting and silencing the independent economists. But truth persists and works, even if nobody is left to utter it.
Ludwig Von Mises
#9. The masses do not like those who surpass them in any regard. The average man envies and hates those who are different.
Ludwig Von Mises
#10. Only very few men have the gift of thinking new and original ideas and of changing the traditional body of creeds and doctrines.
Ludwig Von Mises
#11. The Pseudo-liberals monopolize the teaching jobs at many universities. Only men who agree with them are appointed as teachers and instructors of the social sciences, and only textbooks supporting their ideas are used.
Ludwig Von Mises
#12. Society is joint action and cooperation in which each participant sees the other partner's success as a means for the attainment of his own.
Ludwig Von Mises
#13. One has to recognize that science is not metaphysics, and certainly not mysticism; it can never bring us the illumination and the satisfaction experienced by one enraptured in ecstasy. Science is sobriety and clarity of conception, not intoxicated vision.
Ludwig Von Mises
#14. It is necessary to curb the power of government. This is the task of all constitutions, bills of rights and laws. This is the meaning of all struggles which men have fought for liberty.
Ludwig Von Mises
#15. Under certain conditions, index numbers may do very useful service as an aid to investigation into the history and statistics of prices; for the extension of the theory of the nature and value of money they are unfortunately not very important.
Ludwig Von Mises
#16. The market is not a place, a thing, or a collective entity. It is a process.
Ludwig Von Mises
#17. 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
#18. If any of the socialist chiefs had tried to earn his living by selling hot dogs, he would have learned something about the sovereignty of the consumers.
Ludwig Von Mises
#19. It is impossible to describe any human action if one does not refer to the meaning the actor sees in the stimulus as well as in the end his response is aiming at.
Ludwig Von Mises
#20. Reason is the main resource of man in his struggle for survival.
Ludwig Von Mises
#22. The comparatively greater prosperity of the United States is an outcome of the fact that the New Deal did not come in 1900 or 1910, but only in 1933.
Ludwig Von Mises
#23. Taxes are necessary. But the system of discriminatory taxation universally accepted under the misleading name of progressive taxation of income and inheritance is not a mode of taxation. It is rather a mode of disguised expropriation of the successful capitalists and entrepreneurs.
Ludwig Von Mises
#24. 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
#25. The foundation of any and every civilization, including our own, is private ownership of the means of production. Whoever wishes to criticize modern civilization, therefore, begins with private property.
Ludwig Von Mises
#26. Logic and reasoning, which might show the absurdity of such dreams of bliss and revenge, are to be thrust aside.
Ludwig Von Mises
#27. The productivity of social cooperation surpasses in every respect the sum total of the production of isolated individuals.
Ludwig Von Mises
#28. Sovereignty must not be used for inflicting harm on anyone, whether citizen or foreigner.
Ludwig Von Mises
#29. Once it has been perceived that the division of labour is the essence of society, nothing remains of the antithesis between individual and society. The contradiction between individual principle and social principle disappears.
Ludwig Von Mises
#30. The final outcome of the credit expansion is general impoverishment.
Ludwig Von Mises
#31. We owe the origin and development of human society and, consequently, of culture and civilization, to the fact that work performed under the division of labor is more productive than when performed in isolation.
Ludwig Von Mises
#32. What pays under capitalism is satisfying the common man, the customer. The more people you satisfy, the better for you.
Ludwig Von Mises
#33. The average American worker enjoys amenities for which Croesus, Crassus, the Medici, and Louis XIV would have envied him.
Ludwig Von Mises
#34. History makes one wise, but not competent to solve concrete problems.
Ludwig Von Mises
#35. The flowering of human society depends on two factors: the intellectual power of outstanding men to conceive sound social and economic theories, and the ability of these or other men to make these ideologies palatable to the majority.
Ludwig Von Mises
#36. Since nobody is in a position to substitute his own value judgments for those of the acting individual, it is vain to pass judgment on other people's aims and volitions. No man is qualified to declare what would make another man happier or less discontented.
Ludwig Von Mises
#37. It is impossible to understand the history of economic thought if one does not pay attention to the fact that economics as such is a challenge to the conceit of those in power.
Ludwig Von Mises
#38. 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
#39. The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion.
Ludwig Von Mises
#40. It is evident that youth is the first victim of the trend toward bureaucratization. The young men are deprived of any opportunity to shape their own fate.
Ludwig Von Mises
#41. In many fields of the administration of interventionist measures, favoritism simply cannot be avoided.
Ludwig Von Mises
#42. The concept of a 'just' or 'fair' price is devoid of any scientific meaning; it is a disguise for wishes, a striving for a state of affairs different from reality.
Ludwig Von Mises
#43. The policy of letting the free market determine the height of wage rates is the only reasonable and successful full-employment policy.
Ludwig Von Mises
#44. The bureaucrat is not free to aim at improvement. He is bound to obey rules and regulations established by a superior body. He has no right to embark upon innovations if his superiors do not approve of them. His duty and his virtue is to be obedient.
Ludwig Von Mises
#45. Inflation is the fiscal complement of statism and arbitrary government. It is a cog in the complex of policies and institutions which gradually lead toward totalitarianism .
Ludwig Von Mises
#46. 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
#47. The better an entrepreneur succeeds, the more is he vilified and themore is he soaked by taxation.
Ludwig Von Mises
#48. Man is not, like the animals, an obsequious puppet of instincts and sensual impulses. Man has the power to suppress instinctive desires, he has a will of his own, he chooses between incompatible ends.
Ludwig Von Mises
#49. Lenin's ideal was to build a nation's production effort according to the model of the post office.
Ludwig Von Mises
#50. The planner is a potential dictator who wants to deprive all other people of the power to plan and act according to their own plans. He aims at one thing only: the exclusive absolute preeminence of his own plan.
Ludwig Von Mises
#51. Economic prosperity is not so much a material problem; it is, first of all, an intellectual, spiritual, and moral problem.
Ludwig Von Mises
#52. Human thoughts about things of which neither pure reasoning nor experience provides any knowledge may differ so radically that no agreement can be reached.
Ludwig Von Mises
#53. The doctrine of the importance of hoards for stabilizing the objective exchange-value of money has gradually lost its adherents with the passing of time. Nowadays its supporters are few.
Ludwig Von Mises
#54. No very deep knowledge of economics is usually needed for grasping the immediate effects of a measure; but the task of economics is to foretell the remoter effects, and so to allow us to avoid such acts as attempt to remedy a present ill by sowing the seeds of a much greater ill for the future.
Ludwig Von Mises
#55. 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
#56. The characteristic mark of this age of dictators, wars and revolutions is its anticapitalistic bias. Most governments and political parties were eager to restrict the sphere of private initiative and free enterprise.
Ludwig Von Mises
#57. Experience shows that nothing is operated with less economy and with more waste of labor and material of every kind than public services and undertakings. Private enterprise on the other hand naturally induces the owner to work with the greatest economy in his own interest.
Ludwig Von Mises
#58. The welfare of a people lies not in casting other peoples down but in peaceful collaboration.
Ludwig Von Mises
#59. The illusiveness of this concept of national income is to be seen in its dependence on changes in the purchasing power of the monetary unit. The more inflation progresses, the higher rises the national income.
Ludwig Von Mises
#60. 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
#61. The distinctive principle of Western social philosophy is individualism.
Ludwig Von Mises
#62. If you increase the quantity of money, you bring about the lowering of the purchasing power of the monetary unit.
Ludwig Von Mises
#63. You call it a 'loophole' when the government still allows you some freedom.
Ludwig Von Mises
#64. 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
#65. Assistance granted to the unemployed does not dispose of unemployment. It makes it easier for the unemployed to remain idle.
Ludwig Von Mises
#67. 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
#68. Every step which leads from capitalism toward planning is necessarily a step nearer to absolutism and dictatorship. The
Ludwig Von Mises
#69. The whole of mankind's progress has had to be achieved against the resistance and opposition of the state and its power of coercion.
Ludwig Von Mises
#70. Public works are not accomplished by the miraculous power of a magic wand. They are paid for by funds taken away from the citizens.
Ludwig Von Mises
#71. The attainment of the economic aims of man presupposes peace.
Ludwig Von Mises
#72. No increase in the welfare of the member of society can result from the availability of an additional quantity of money.
Ludwig Von Mises
#73. Each epoch has found in the Gospels what it sought to find there, and has overlooked what it wished to overlook.
Ludwig Von Mises
#74. There is no kind of freedom and liberty other than the kind which the market economy brings about.
Ludwig Von Mises
#76. 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
#77. The average man is both better informed and less corruptible in the decisions he makes as a consumer than as a voter at political elections.
Ludwig Von Mises
#78. The vigorous man industriously striving for the improvement of his condition acts neither more nor less than the lethargic man who sluggishly takes things as they come. For to do nothing and to be idle are also action, they too determine the course of events.
Ludwig Von Mises
#79. The boom produces impoverishment. But still more disastrous are its moral ravages. It makes people despondent and dispirited. The more optimistic they were under the illusory prosperity of the boom, the greater is their despair and their feeling of frustration.
Ludwig Von Mises
#80. Under capitalism everybody is the architect of his own fortune.
Ludwig Von Mises
#81. In spite of the anticapitalistic policies of all governments and of almost all political parties, the capitalist mode of production
Ludwig Von Mises
#82. Naive inflationism demands an increase in the quantity of money without suspecting that this will diminish the purchasing power of the money.
Ludwig Von Mises
#83. 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
#84. The only means to well-being is to increase the quantity of products. This is what business aims at.
Ludwig Von Mises
#85. 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
#86. It is inherent in the nature of the capitalistic economy that, in the final analysis, the employment of the factors of production is aimed only toward serving the wishes of consumers.
Ludwig Von Mises
#87. 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
#88. What impels every man to the utmost exertion in the service of his fellow man. Is, in the market not compulsion on the part of gendarmes, hangmen and penal courts, it is self interest.
Ludwig Von Mises
#89. It is indeed one of the principal drawbacks of every kind of interventionism that it is so difficult to reverse the process.
Ludwig Von Mises
#90. What makes small business develop into big business is not spending, but saving and capital accumulation.
Ludwig Von Mises
#91. What pushes the masses into the camp of socialism is, even more than the illusion that socialism will make them richer, the expectation that it will curb all those who are better than they themselves are.
Ludwig Von Mises
#92. History cannot teach us any general rule, principle, or law. There is no means to abstract from a historical experience a posteriori any theories or theorems concerning human conduct and policies. The
Ludwig Von Mises
#93. [E]conomic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics
Ludwig Von Mises
#94. Nothing, however, is as ill founded as the assertion of the alleged equality of all members of the human race.
Ludwig Von Mises
#95. Men are fighting ... because they are convinced that the extermination of adversaries is the only means of promoting their own well-being.
Ludwig Von Mises
#96. The most serious dangers for American freedom and the American way of life do not come from without.
Ludwig Von Mises
#97. 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
#98. Unemployment doles can have no other effect than the perpetuation of unemployment.
Ludwig Von Mises
#99. The fact is that, under a capitalistic system, the ultimate bosses are the consumers. The sovereign is not the state, it is the people.
Ludwig Von Mises
#100. Depressions and mass unemployment are not caused by the free market but by government interference in the economy.
Ludwig Von Mises
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