Top 500 Ludwig von Mises Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The real bosses, in the capitalist system of market economy, are the consumers.”

— Ludwig von Mises

52. “All people, however fanatical they may be in their zeal to disparage and to fight capitalism, implicitly pay homage to it by passionately clamoring for the products it turns out.”

— Ludwig von Mises

53. “The meaning of economic freedom is this: that the individual is in a position to choose the way in which he wants to integrate himself into the totality of society.”

— Ludwig von Mises

54. “Only to bureaucrats can the idea occur that establishing new offices, promulgating new decrees, and increasing the number of government employees alone can be described as positive and beneficial measures.”

— Ludwig von Mises

55. “The philosophy of protectionism is a philosophy of war. The wars of our age are not at variance with popular economic doctrines; they are, on the contrary, the inescapable result of a consistent application of these doctrines.”

— Ludwig von Mises

56. “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

57. “It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.”

— Ludwig von Mises

58. “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.”

— Ludwig von Mises

59. “The salesman thanks the customer for patronizing his shop and asks him to come again. But the socialists say: Be grateful to Hitler, render thanks to Stalin; be nice and submissive, then the great man will be kind to you later too.”

— Ludwig von Mises

60. “Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

62. “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

63. “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.”

— Ludwig von Mises

64. “Government is essentially the negation of liberty.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

66. “There prevails on a free labor market a tendency toward full employment.”

— Ludwig von Mises

67. “Depressions and mass unemployment are not caused by the free market but by government interference in the economy.”

— Ludwig von Mises

68. “Socialist society is a society of officials.”

— Ludwig von Mises

69. “The worst thing that can happen to a socialist is to have his country ruled by socialists who are not his friends.”

— Ludwig von Mises

70. “Rulers do not like to admit that their power is restricted by any laws other than those of physics and biology. They never ascribe their failures and frustrations to the violation of economic law.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

74. “There is no such thing as a just and fair method of exercising the tremendous power that interventionism puts into the hands of the legislature and the executive.”

— Ludwig von Mises

75. “The capitalist system, in spite of all obstacles put in its way by governments and politicians, has raised the standard of living of the masses in an unprecedented way.”

— Ludwig von Mises

76. “No one can escape the influence of a prevailing ideology.”

— Ludwig von Mises

77. “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

78. “No private enterprise will ever fall prey to bureaucratic methods of management if it is operated with the sole aim of making profit.”

— Ludwig von Mises

79. “In the capitalist society there is a place and bread for all. Its ability to expand provides sustenance for every worker. Permanent unemployment is not a feature of free capitalism.”

— Ludwig von Mises

80. “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

81. “Capital is not a free gift of God or of nature. It is the outcome of a provident restriction of consumption on the part of man. It is created and increased by saving and maintained by the abstention from dissaving.”

— Ludwig von Mises

82. “Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

84. “What is a loophole? If the law does not punish a definite action or does not tax a definite thing, this is not a loophole. It is simply the law.”

— Ludwig von Mises

85. “Credit expansion can bring about a temporary boom. But such a fictitious prosperity must end in a general depression of trade, a slump.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

87. “The market economy needs no apologists and propagandists. It can apply to itself the words of Sir Christopher Wren’s epitaph in St. Paul’s: ‘If you seek his monument, look around.’”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

90. “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

91. “Inflation has always been an important resource of policies of war and revolution and why we also find it in the service of socialism.”

— Ludwig von Mises

92. “How pale is the art of sorcerers, witches, and conjurors when compared with that of the government’s Treasury Department!”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

94. “Socialism is an alternative to capitalism as potassium cyanide is an alternative to water.”

— Ludwig von Mises

95. “The state is essentially an apparatus of compulsion and coercion. The characteristic feature of its activities is to compel people through the application or the threat of force to behave otherwise than they would like to behave.”

— Ludwig von Mises

96. “Science does not give us absolute and final certainty. It only gives us assurance within the limits of our mental abilities and the prevailing state of scientific thought.”

— Ludwig von Mises

97. “The causes of all panics, crashes and depressions can be summed up in only four words: the misuse of credit.”

— Ludwig von Mises

98. “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.”

— Ludwig von Mises

99. “The alcoholic and the drug addict harm only themselves by their behavior; the person who violates the rules of morality governing mans life in society harms not only himself, but everyone.”

— Ludwig von Mises

100. “Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.”

— Ludwig von Mises