Ludwig Von Mises quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Ludwig Von Mises

Ludwig Von Mises Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Ludwig Von Mises on Wise Famous Quotes.

the individual is today no longer primarily a citizen, but a party member.

Liberty is always freedom from the government.

The policy of letting the free market determine the height of wage rates is the only reasonable and successful full-employment policy.

It is labor alone that is productive: it creates wealth and therewith lays the outward foundations for the inward flowering of man.

In science, compromise is a betrayal of truth.

Wars of aggression are popular nowadays with those nations convinced that only victory and conquest could improve their material well-being.

The policies advocated by the welfare school remove the incentive to saving on the part of private citizens.

Almost all the fathers of socialism were members of the upper middle class or of the professions.

There is no reason why capitalists and entrepreneurs should be ashamed of earning profits.

The productivity of social cooperation surpasses in every respect the sum total of the production of isolated individuals.

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

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

What pays under capitalism is satisfying the common man, the customer. The more people you satisfy, the better for you.

A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets.

Economic progress is the work of the savers, who accumulate capital, and of the entrepreneurs, who turn capital to new uses.

The criterion of truth is that it works even if nobody is prepared to acknowledge it.

The first thing a genius needs is to breath free air.

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.

More dangerous than bayonets and cannon are the weapons of the mind.

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

Society is only possible on these terms, that the individual finds therein a strengthening of his own ego and his own will.

Men are fighting ... because they are convinced that the extermination of adversaries is the only means of promoting their own well-being.

Civilization is a work of peaceful co-operation.

Under capitalism everybody provides for their own needs by serving others.

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.

There cannot be stable money within an environment dominated by ideologies hostile to the preservation of economic freedom.

The distinctive principle of Western social philosophy is individualism.

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

Depression is the aftermath of credit expansion.

Freedom and liberty always mean freedom from police interference.

Every type of socialism is unworkable because economic calculation is impossible in a socialist community.

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

Nobody can be at the same time a correct bureaucrat and an innovator

Lenin's ideal was to build a nation's production effort according to the model of the post office.

We must fight all that we dislike in public life. We must substitute better ideas for wrong ideas.

The entrepreneur profits to the extent he has succeeded in serving the consumers better than other people have done.

The market is not a place, a thing, or a collective entity. It is a process.

My theories explain, but cannot slow the decline of a great civilization. I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline.

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

The people who think that the power of big business is enormous are mistaken

Socialism and interventionism. Both have in common the goal of subordinating the individual unconditionally to the state.

If the government objects to monopoly prices for new inventions, it should stop granting patents.

Economic prosperity is not so much a material problem; it is, first of all, an intellectual, spiritual, and moral problem.

Without speculation there can be no economic activity reaching beyond the immediate present.

If one regards inflation as an evil, then one has to stop inflating. One has to balance the budget of the government.

The only source from which an entrepreneurs profits stem is his ability to anticipate better than other people the future demand of the consumers.

You call it a 'loophole' when the government still allows you some freedom.

Taxing profits is tantamount to taxing success.

Our whole civilization rests on the fact that men have always succeeded in beating off the attack of the re-distributors.

The Santa Claus principle liquidates itself.

Every specific tax, as well as the nation's whole tax system, becomes self-defeating above a certain height of the rates.

Western civilization is based upon the libertarian principle, and all its achievements are the results of the action of free men.

The uncouth hordes of common men are not fit to recognize duly the merits of those who eclipse their own wretchedness.

What governments call international monetary cooperation is concerted action for the sake of credit expansion.

If men do not now succeed in abolishing war, civilization and mankind are doomed.

The market system makes all producers responsible to the consumer.

Doctrines which can stand the trial of logic and reason can do without persecuting skeptics. This

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

The first socialists were the intellectuals; they, and not the masses, are the backbone of Socialism.

All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts.

A wealthy man can preserve his wealth only by continuing to serve the consumers in the most efficient way.

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

The masses do not like those who surpass them in any regard. The average man envies and hates those who are different.

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

Each epoch has found in the Gospels what it sought to find there, and has overlooked what it wished to overlook.

Historical knowledge is indispensable for those who want to build a better world

Economically considered, war and revolution are always bad business.

All almsgiving inevitably tends to pauperize the recipient.

The living is not perfect because it is liable to change; the dead is not perfect because it does not live.

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

Socialist society is a society of officials.

The program of classical liberalism, condensed into a single word, would have to read: property.

Government is the only institution that can take a valuable commodity like paper, and make it worthless by applying ink.

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

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

A higher standard of living also brings about a higher standard of culture and civilization.

Nobody is in a position to decree what should make a fellow man happier.

The wealth of the well-to-do of an industrial society is both the cause and effect of the masses' well-being.

There were nowhere more docile disciples of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin than the Nazis were.

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.

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

Every socialist is a disguised dictator.

The central element in the economic problem of money is the objective exchange-value of money, popularly called its purchasing power.

Public opinion always wants easy money, that is, low interest rates.

Every collectivist assumes a different source for the collective will, according to his own political, religious and national convictions.

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

Government is essentially the negation of liberty.

No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want.

Every restriction of trade creates vested interests that are from then on opposed to its removal.

Big business always serve - directly or indirectly - the masses.

Fortunes cannot grow; someone has to increase them.

Modern society, based as it is on the division of labor, can be preserved only under conditions of lasting peace.

Government is an apparatus of compulsion and coercion.

[T]he essence of so-called war prosperity: it enriches some by what it takes from others. It is not rising wealth but a shifting of wealth and income.

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

Both force and money are impotent against ideas.

There is no kind of freedom and liberty other than the kind which the market economy brings about.

What mankind needs today is liberation from the rule of nonsensical slogans and a return to sound reasoning.

The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty.

Anarchism misunderstands the real nature of man. It would be practicable only in a world of angels and saints