Top 500 Ludwig von Mises Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “What vitiates entirely the socialists economic critique of capitalism is their failure to grasp the sovereignty of the consumers in the market economy.”

— Ludwig von Mises

452. “Nobody ever 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.”

— Ludwig von Mises

453. “Not mythical material productive forces, but reason and ideas determine the course of human affairs. What is needed to stop the trend toward socialism and despotism is common-sense and moral courage.”

— Ludwig von Mises

454. “There is in the universe something for the description and analysis of which the natural sciences cannot contribute anything. There are events beyond the range of those events that the procedures of the natural sciences are fit to observe and describe. There is human action.”

— Ludwig von Mises

455. “The supremacy of public opinion determines not only the singular role that economics occupies in the complex of thought and knowledge. It determines the whole process of human history.”

— Ludwig von Mises

456. “Capitalism has succeeded in raising the material well-being of the masses in an unprecedented way. In the capitalist countries population figures are now several times higher than they were at the eve of the “industrial revolution,” and every citizen of these nations enjoys a standard of living much higher than that of the well-to-do of earlier ages.”

— Ludwig von Mises

457. “When a country has substituted credit money or fiat money for metallic money, because the legal equating of the over-issued paper and the metallic money sets in motion the mechanism described by Gresham’s Law, it is often asserted that the balance of payments determines the rate of exchange. But this also is a quite inadequate explanation. The rate of exchange is determined by the purchasing power possessed by a unit of each kind of money.”

— Ludwig von Mises

458. “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

459. “Those who disagree with the dictator’s plan have no other means to carry on than to defeat the despot by force of arms.”

— Ludwig von Mises

460. “An intellectual inferiority of the masses would manifest itself most evidently in their aiming at the abolition of the system in which they themselves are supreme and are served by the elite of the most talented men.”

— Ludwig von Mises

461. “The collapse of an inflation policy carried to its extreme – as in the United States in 1781 and in France in 1796 – does not destroy the monetary system, but only the credit money or fiat money of the State that has overestimated the effectiveness of its own policy. The collapse emancipates commerce from etatism and establishes metallic money again.”

— Ludwig von Mises

462. “A third group of inflationists do not deny that inflation involves serious disadvantages. Nevertheless, they think that there are higher and more important aims of economic policy than a sound monetary system. They hold that although inflation may be a great evil, yet it is not the greatest evil, and that the State might under certain circumstances find itself in a position where it would do well to oppose greater evils with the lesser evil of inflation.”

— Ludwig von Mises

463. “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

464. “Production is “anarchistic.”

— Ludwig von Mises

465. “It is not in the power of governments to increase the supply of one commodity without a corresponding restriction in the supply of other commodities more urgently demanded by consumers. The authority may reduce the price of one commodity only by raising the prices of others.”

— Ludwig von Mises

466. “To measure is to determine the ratio of one quantity to another which is invariable or assumed to be invariable. Invariability in respect of the property to be measured, or at least the legitimacy of assuming such invariability, is a sine qua non of all measurement. Only when this assumption is admissible is it possible to determine the variations that are to be measured.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

468. “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

469. “That the social life of human beings is subject to definite limitations; that it is governed by a set of laws that are comparable with those of Nature; these are notions that are unknown to the etatist. For the etatist, everything is a question of Macht – power, force, might. And his conception of Macht is crudely materialistic.”

— Ludwig von Mises

470. “The school is a political prize of the highest importance. It cannot be deprived of its political character as long as it remains a public and compulsory institution.”

— Ludwig von Mises

471. “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

472. “No individual and no nation need fear at any time to have less money than it needs. Government measures designed to regulate the international movement of money in order to ensure that the community shall have the amount it needs, are just as unnecessary and inappropriate as, say, intervention to ensure a sufficiency or corn or iron or the like. This argument dealt the Mercantilist Theory its death-blow.”

— Ludwig von Mises

473. “No increase in the welfare of the member of society can result from the availability of an additional quantity of money.”

— Ludwig von Mises

474. “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

475. “During the 2300 years since Plato, very little opposition has been registered to his ideas.”

— Ludwig von Mises

476. “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

477. “Other inflationists realize very well that an increase in the quantity of money reduces the purchasing power of the monetary unit. But they endeavour to secure inflation none-the-less, because of its effect on the value of money; they want depreciation, because they want to favour debtors at the expense of creditors and because they want to encourage exportation and make importation difficult.”

— Ludwig von Mises

478. “Thus, the isolated interference with one or a few prices of consumer goods always bring about effects-and this is important to realize-which are even less satisfactory than the conditions that prevailed before.”

— Ludwig von Mises

479. “The people of the United States are more prosperous than the inhabitants of all other countries because their government embarked later than the governments in other parts of the world upon the policy of obstructing business.”

— Ludwig von Mises

480. “The exchange-value of money is the anticipated use-value of the things that can be obtained with it.”

— Ludwig von Mises

481. “Reason and action are congeneric and homogenous, two aspects of the same phenomenon.”

— Ludwig von Mises

482. “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

483. “One must rather ask how much could be produced if competition among producers were abolished.”

— Ludwig von Mises

484. “The role played by man in production always consists solely in combining his personal forces with the forces of Nature in such a way that the cooperation leads to some particular desired arrangement of material. No human act of production amounts to more than altering the position of things in space and leaving the rest to Nature.”

— Ludwig von Mises

485. “Every step by which an individual substitutes concerted action for isolated action results in an immediate and recognizable improvement in his conditions. The advantages derived from peaceful cooperation and division of labor are universal.”

— Ludwig von Mises

486. “The attempt to restrain prices within limits has to be given up. A government that sets out to abolish market prices is inevitably driven towards the abolition of private property.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

488. “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

489. “Every extension of the functions and power of the State beyond its primary duty of maintaining peace and justice should be scrutinized with jealous vigilance.”

— Ludwig von Mises

490. “The State does not govern the market; in the market in which products are exchanged it may quite possibly be a powerful party, but nevertheless it is only one party of many, nothing more than that. All its attempts to transform the exchange-ratios between economic goods that are determined in the market can only be undertaken with the instruments of the market.”

— Ludwig von Mises

491. “In capitalist enterprise there is no secure income and no security of wealth.”

— Ludwig von Mises

492. “The social displacements that occur as consequences of variations in the value of money result solely from the circumstance that this assumption never holds good. In the chapter dealing with the determinants of the objective exchange-value of money it was shown that variations in the value of money always start from a given point and gradually spread out from this point through the whole community.”

— Ludwig von Mises

493. “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

494. “The entrepreneur who is reckoning in terms of a currency with a stable value is unable to compete with the entrepreneur who is prepared to make a quasi-gift of part of his capital to his customers. In 1920 and 1921, Dutch traders who had sold commodities to Austria could buy them back again after a while much cheaper than they had originally sold them, because the Austrian traders completely failed to see that they were selling them for less than they had cost.”

— Ludwig von Mises

495. “The oldest and most popular instrument of etatistic monetary policy is the official fixing of maximum prices. High prices, thinks the etatist, are not a consequence of an increase in the quantity of money, but a consequence of reprehensible activity on the part of ‘bulls’ and ‘profiteers’; it will suffice to suppress their machinations in order to ensure the cessation of the rise of prices. Thus it is made a punishable offence to demand, or even to pay, ‘excessive’ prices.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

497. “If people do not consume their whole incomes, the non-consumed surplus can be invested, it increases the amount of capital goods available and thereby makes it possible to embark upon projects which could not be executed before.”

— Ludwig von Mises

498. “He who cares to go to the trouble of demonstrating the uselessness of index numbers for monetary theory and the concrete tasks of monetary policy will be able to select a good proportion of his weapons from the writings of the very men who invented them.”

— Ludwig von Mises

499. “Economic history shows us a continual increase in the demand for money. The characteristic feature of the development of the demand for money is its intensification; the growth of division of labour and consequently of exchange transactions, which have constantly become more and more indirect and dependent on the use of money, have helped to bring this about, as well as the increase of population and prosperity.”

— Ludwig von Mises

500. “The capitalist system was termed “capitalism” not by a friend of the system, but by an individual who considered it to be the worst of all historical systems, the greatest evil that had ever befallen mankind. That man was Karl Marx.”

— Ludwig von Mises