Ludwig von Mises Quotes

232 Sourced Quotes

The avowed aim of all utopian movements is to put an end to history and to establish a final and permanent calm.

Ludwig von Mises
What matters is not the allocation of portions out of a fund presented to man by nature. The problem is rather to further those social institutions which enable people to continue and to enlarge the production of all those things which they need.

Ludwig von Mises
The philosophy underlying the system of progressive taxation is that the income and wealth of the well-to-do classes can be freely tapped. What the advocates of these tax rates fail to realize is that the greater part of the incomes taxed away would not have been consumed but saved and invested.

Ludwig von Mises
A country becomes more prosperous in proportion to the rise in the invested capital unit per unit of its population.

Ludwig von Mises
The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning.

Ludwig von Mises
Scientific criticism has no nobler task than to shatter false beliefs.

Ludwig von Mises
American authors or scientists are prone to consider the wealthy businessman as a barbarian, as a man exclusively intent upon making money.

Ludwig von Mises
The prevailing legal and moral views of a time are held not only by those whom they benefit but by those, too, who appear to suffer from them. Their domination is expressed in that fact- that the people from whom they claim sacrifice accept them.

Ludwig von Mises
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
No one should expect that any logical argument or any experience could ever shake the almost religious fervor of those who believe in salvation through spending and credit expansion.

Ludwig von Mises
There is, in fact, only one solution: the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions

Ludwig von Mises
The market steers the capitalistic economy. It directs each individual's activities into those channels in which he best serves the wants of his fellow-men. The market alone puts the whole social system of private ownership of the means of production and free enterprise in order and provides it with sense and meaning.

Ludwig von Mises
While under precapitalistic conditions superior men were the masters on whom the masses of the inferior had to attend, under capitalism the more gifted and more able have no means to profit from their superiority other than to serve to the best of their abilities the wishes of the majority of the less gifted.

Ludwig von Mises
In a battle between force and an idea, the latter always prevails.

Ludwig von Mises
Freedom and liberty always mean freedom from police interference.

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

Ludwig von Mises
Two hundred years ago, before the advent of capitalism, a man's social status was fixed from the beginning to the end of his life; he inherited it from his ancestors and it never changed.

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

Ludwig von Mises
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
The methods of the natural sciences cannot be applied to human behavior because this behaviorlacks the peculiarity that characterizes events in the field of the natural sciences, viz., regularity.

Ludwig von Mises
The only source of the generation of additional capital goods is saving. If all the goods produced are consumed, no new capital comes into being.

Ludwig von Mises
Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build, it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created.

Ludwig von Mises
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
The essence of Keynesianism is its complete failure to conceive the role that saving and capital accumulation play in the improvement of economic conditions.

Ludwig von Mises
There is an inherent tendency in all governmental power to recognize no restraints on its operation and to extend the sphere of its dominion as much as possible. To control everything, to leave no room for anything to happen of its own accord without the interference of the authorities--th is is the goal for which every ruler secretly strives.

Ludwig von Mises
A new type of superstition has got hold of people's minds, the worship of the state. People demand the exercise of the methods of coercion and compulsion, of violence and threat. Woe to anybody who does not bend his knee to the fashionable idols!

Ludwig von Mises
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.

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

Ludwig von Mises
Interventionism cannot be considered as an economic system destined to stay. It is a method for the transformation of capitalism into socialism by a series of successive steps.

Ludwig von Mises