Ludwig von Mises quotes

“The Marxian dogma according to which socialism is bound to come 'with the inexorability of a law of nature' is just an arbitrary surmise devoid of any proof.”

“Those fighting for free enterprise and free competition do not defend the interests of those rich today. They want a free hand left to unknown men who will be the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.”

“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.”

“To advise man to return to the physical and intellectual features of his prehistoric ancestors is no more reasonable than to ask him to renounce his upright gait and to grow a tail again.”

“The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. The history of the West, from the age of the Greek polis down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders.”

“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.”

“All almsgiving inevitably tends to pauperize the recipient.”

“The alternative to the rule of law is the rule of despots.”

“Assistance granted to the unemployed does not dispose of unemployment. It makes it easier for the unemployed to remain idle.”

“All attempts to coerce the living will of human beings into the service of something they do not want must fail.”

“In a battle between force and an idea, the latter always prevails.”

“Big business always serves—directly or indirectly—the masses.”

“Both force and money are impotent against ideas.”

“Bureaucratic management is management bound to comply with detailed rules and regulations fixed by the authority of a superior body.”

“Capitalism or market economy is that system of social cooperation and division of labor that is based on private ownership of the means of production.”

“Capitalism needs neither propaganda nor apostles. Its achievements speak for themselves. Capitalism delivers the goods.”

“No censor, no emperor, no pope, has ever possessed the power to suppress intellectual freedom which would be possessed by a socialist community.”

“But the certain fact about inflation is that, sooner or later, it must come to an end. It is a policy that cannot last.”

“Civilization is a work of peaceful co-operation.”

“The classical or orthodox gold standard alone is a truly effective check on the power of the government to inflate the currency. Without such a check all other constitutional safeguards can be rendered vain.”

“Collaboration of the more talented, more able, and more industrious with the less talented, less able, and less industrious results in benefit for both. The gains derived from the division of labor are always mutual.”

“As conditions are today, nothing can be more important to every intelligent man than economics. His own fate and that of his progeny is at stake.”

“The market economy is a system of consumers' supremacy.”

“Continued adherence to a policy of compulsory education is utterly incompatible with efforts to establish lasting peace.”

“Continued inflation inevitably leads to catastrophe.”

“Daily experience proves clearly to everybody but the most bigoted fanatics of socialism that governmental management is inefficient and wasteful.”

“To defeat the aggressors is not enough to make peace durable. The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war.”

“Democracy is not a good that people can enjoy without trouble. It is, on the contrary, a treasure that must be daily defended and conquered anew by strenuous effort.”

“Depression is the aftermath of credit expansion.”

“Economic knowledge necessarily leads to liberalism.”

“Economically considered, war and revolution are always bad business.”

“Economics is not about goods and services; it is about human choice and action.”

“Economics deals with real man, weak and subject to error as he is, not with ideal beings, omniscient and perfect as only gods could be.”

“Economics must not be relegated to classrooms and statistical offices and must not be left to esoteric circles. It is the philosophy of human life and action and concerns everybody and everything. It is the pith of civilization and of man’s human existence.”

“The economist must never be a specialist. In dealing with any problem he must always fix his glance upon the whole system.”

“The emergence of the international division of labor requires the total abolition of war.”

“The essence of a credit-expansion boom is not overinvestment, but investment in wrong lines, i.e., malinvestment.”

“The essence of etatism is to take from one group in order to give to another. The more it can take the more it can give. It is to the interest of those whom the government wishes to favor that their state become as large as possible.”

“The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.”

“Estate taxes of the height they have already attained for the upper brackets are no longer to be qualified as taxes. They are measures of expropriation.”

“European totalitarianism is an upshot of bureaucracy’s preeminence in the field of education. The universities paved the way for the dictators.”

“Every socialist is a disguised dictator.”

“Every step which leads from capitalism toward planning is necessarily a step nearer to absolutism and dictatorship.”

“Everyone who preaches the right of the stronger considers himself as the stronger. He who espouses the institution of slavery never stops to reflect that he himself could be a slave.”

“A free press can exist only where there is private control on the means of production.”

“Freedom, democracy, peace, and private property are deemed good because they are the best means for promoting human happiness and welfare. Liberalism wants to secure to man a life free from fear and want. That is all.”

“Freedom is indivisible. As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop.”

“The freedom of man under capitalism is an effect of competition.”

“Freedom must be granted to all, even to base people, lest the few who can use it for the benefit of mankind be hindered.”

“Freedom really means the freedom to make mistakes.”

“The fundamental law of the market is: the customer is always right.”

“It is not God. It is simply compulsion and coercion; it is the police power.”

“The government and its chiefs do not have the powers of the mythical Santa Claus. They cannot spend except by taking out of the pockets of some people for the benefit of others.”

“Government is essentially the negation of liberty.”

“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.”

“Government means always coercion and compulsion and is by necessity the opposite of liberty.”

“History can tell us what happened in the past. But it cannot assert that it must happen again in the future.”

“If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.”

“History makes one wise, but not competent to solve concrete problems.”

“History speaks only to those people who know how to interpret it.”

“The horrors of revolution and civil war can be avoided if a disliked government can be smoothly dislodged at the next election.”

“The idea of justice refers always to social cooperation.”

“The idea that political freedom can be preserved in the absence of economic freedom, and vice versa, is an illusion. Political freedom is the corollary of economic freedom.”

“Inflation is essentially antidemocratic.”

“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.”

“Inflation is the true opium of the people and it is administered to them by anticapitalist governments and parties.”

“Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them.”

“No international authority can preserve peace if economic wars continue. In our age of international division of labor, free trade is the prerequisite for any amicable arrangement between nations. And free trade is impossible in a world of etatism.”

“Go into the home of the average American family and you will see for whom the wheels of the machines are turning.”

“The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution.”

“Laissez faire means: Let the common man choose and act; do not force him to yield to a dictator.”

“Liberalism champions private property in the means of production because it expects a higher standard of living from such an economic organization, not because it wishes to help the owners.”

“Liberty is always freedom from the government.”

“Logical thinking and real life are not two separate orbits. Logic is for man the only means to master the problems of reality.”

“The main achievement of economics is that it has provided a theory of peaceful human cooperation. This is why the harbingers of violent conflict have branded it as a “dismal science” and why this age of wars, civil wars, and destruction has no use for it.”

“The main political problem is how to prevent the rulers from becoming despots and enslaving the citizenry.”

“Man has only one tool to fight error: reason.”

“The market economy involves peaceful cooperation. It bursts asunder when the citizens turn into warriors and, instead of exchanging commodities and services, fight one another.”

“The market is not a place, a thing, or a collective entity. The market is a process, actuated by the interplay of the actions of the various individuals cooperating under the division of labor.”

“The market process is a daily repeated plebiscite, and it ejects inevitably from the ranks of profitable people those who do not employ their property according to the orders given by the public.”

“All the marvelous achievements of Western civilization are fruits grown on the tree of liberty.”

“The member of a contractual society is free because he serves others only in serving himself. What restrains him is only the inevitable natural phenomenon of scarcity.”

“Men must choose between the market economy and socialism. They cannot evade deciding between these alternatives by adopting a “middle-of-the-road” position, whatever name they may give to it.”

“Men are unequal; individuals differ from one another. They differ because their prenatal as well as their postnatal history is never identical.”

“It is merely a metaphor to call competition competitive war, or simply, war. The function of battle is destruction; of competition, construction.”

“The metamorphosis of taxes into weapons of destruction is the mark of present-day public finance.”

“The middle-of-the-road policy is not an economic system that can last. It is a method for the realization of socialism by installments.”

“Money has no utility other than that arising from the possibility of obtaining other economic goods in exchange for it.”

“The most important thing to remember is that inflation is not an act of God, that inflation is not a catastrophe of the elements or a disease that comes like the plague. Inflation is a policy.”

“Most of the tyrants, despots, and dictators are sincerely convinced that their rule is beneficial for the people, that theirs is government for the people.”

“Nazi economists wasted much time in searching the genealogical tree of Carl Menger for Jewish ancestors; they did not succeed.”

“Nazism conquered Germany because it never encountered any adequate intellectual resistance.”

“Nobody every recommended a dictatorship aiming at ends other than those he himself approved. He who advocates dictatorship always advocates the unrestricted rule of his own will.”

“Nothing, however, is as ill founded as the assertion of the alleged equality of all members of the human race.”

“Nothing is more calculated to make a demagogue popular than a constantly reiterated demand for heavy taxes on the rich. Capital levies and high income taxes on the larger incomes are extraordinarily popular with the masses, who do not have to pay them.”

“The only means to lasting peace is to remove the root causes of war.”

“Only the naive inflationists could believe that government could enrich mankind through fiat money.”

“The only task of the strictly Liberal state is to secure life and property against attacks both from external and internal foes.”

“Only those on the government’s payroll are rated as unselfish and noble.”

“The ordered organization of coercion we call the State.”

“People can today seek salvation only in democracy, in the right of self-determination both of individuals and of nations.”

“People frequently call socialism a religion. It is indeed the religion of self-deification.”

“Perhaps they think that they will exercise power for the general good, but that is what all those with power have believed. Power is evil in itself, regardless of who exercises it.”

“The planned economy is the most rigid system of enslavement history has ever known.”

“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.”

“In the political field it is always the will of the majority that prevails, and the minorities must yield to it.”

“In the political sphere, there is no means for an individual or a small group of individuals to disobey the will of the majority. But in the intellectual field private property makes rebellion possible.”

“Private ownership in the means of production is the only necessary condition for the extensive development of the division of labor. The enslavement of the worker was not necessary to create it.”

“Progressive taxation of income and profits means that precisely those parts of the income which people would have saved and invested are taxed away.”

“With all the regard due to the sublime self-effacement of saints, we cannot help stating the fact that the world would be in a rather desolate condition if it were peopled exclusively by men not interested in the pursuit of material well-being.”

“If one rejects laissez faire on account of man’s fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action.”

“It is the rule of law alone which hinders the rulers from turning themselves into the worst gangsters.”

“The sharper the competition, the better it serves its social function to improve economic production.”

“Socialism and democracy are irreconcilable.”

“Socialism knows no freedom of choice in occupation. Everyone has to do what he is told to do and to go where he is sent.”

“Socialism is the renunciation of rational economy.”

“Some experts have declared that it is necessary to tax the people until it hurts. I disagree with these sadists.”

“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.”

“Sound money still means today what it meant in the nineteenth century: the gold standard.”

“A state whose chiefs recognize but one rule, to do whatever seems at the moment to be expedient in their eyes, is a state without law. It does not make any difference whether or not these tyrants are “benevolent.””

“The superiority of the gold standard consists in the fact that the value of gold develops independent of political actions.”

“In talking about equality and asking vehemently for its realization, nobody advocates a curtailment of his own present income.”

“Tax-supported universities are under the sway of the party in power. The authorities try to appoint only professors who are ready to advance ideas of which they themselves approve.”

“Taxing profits is tantamount to taxing success.”

“There is economics and there is economic history. The two must never be confused.”

“There are only economists and laymen. There are no such things as labor economists or farm economists.”

“There is no such thing as prices outside the market. Prices cannot be constructed synthetically, as it were.”

“There is no western, capitalistic country in which the conditions of the masses have not improved in an unprecedented way.”

“Thoughts and ideas are not phantoms. They are real things. Although intangible and immaterial, they are factors in bringing about changes in the realm of tangible and material things.”

“Truth is not the halfway point between two untruths.”

“Truth has its own way. It works and produces effects even if party programs and textbooks refuse to acknowledge it as truth.”

“Truth persists and works, even if nobody is left to utter it.”

“For two hundred years the governments have interfered with the market’s choice of the money medium. Even the most bigoted étatists do not venture to assert that this interference has proved beneficial.”

“Tyranny is the political corollary of socialism, as representative government is the political corollary of the market economy.”

“Ultimately the granting of pensions amounts to a restriction of the wage earner’s freedom to use his total income according to his own designs.”

“Under laissez faire peaceful coexistence of a multitude of sovereign nations is possible. Under government control of business it is impossible.”

“Unemployment doles can have no other effect than the perpetuation of unemployment.”

“He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.”

“Value is not intrinsic. It is not in things and conditions but in the valuing subject.”

“War can really cause no economic boom, at least not directly, since an increase in wealth never does result from destruction of goods.”

“The Welfare State is merely a method for transforming the market economy step by step into socialism.”

“The Welfare State with its methods of easy money, credit expansion and undisguised inflation continually takes bites out of all claims payable in units of the nation’s legal tender.”

“Western civilization is based upon the libertarian principle and all its achievements are the result of the actions of free men.”

“What distinguishes the Austrian School and will lend it everlasting fame is its doctrine of economic action, in contrast to one of economic equilibrium or nonaction.”

“What the incompatibility of war and capitalism really means is that war and high civilization are incompatible.”

“What has made many of the present-day universities by and large nurseries of socialism is not so much the conditions prevailing in the departments of economics as the teachings handed down in other departments.”

“What those people who ask for equality have in mind is always an increase in their own power to consume.”

“What transformed the world of horse-drawn carriages, sailing ships, and windmills step by step into a world of airplanes and electronics was the laissez-faire principle.”

“What vitiates entirely the socialists’ economic critique of capitalism is their failure to grasp the sovereignty of the consumers in the market economy.”

“Whoever wishes peace among peoples must fight statism.”

“The whole of mankind’s progress has had to be achieved against the resistance and opposition of the state and its power of coercion.”

“Within the market society each serves all his fellow citizens and each is served by them. It is a system of mutual exchange of services and commodities, a mutual giving and receiving.”

“Within a world of free trade and democracy there are no incentives for war and conquest.”

“No wonder that all who have had something new to offer humanity have had nothing good to say of the state or its laws!”

“The word “Capitalism” expresses, for our age, the sum of all evil. Even the opponents of Socialism are dominated by socialist ideas.”

“The worst law is better than bureaucratic tyranny.”

“The worst and most dangerous form of absolutist rule is that of an intolerant majority.”

“Yet the criterion of truth is that it works even if nobody is prepared to acknowledge it.”

“If you increase the quantity of money, you bring about the lowering of the purchasing power of the monetary unit.”