Top 500 Ludwig von Mises Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “If the members of parliament no longer consider themselves mandatories of the taxpayers but deputies of those receiving salaries, wages, subsidies, doles, and other benefits from the treasury, democracy is done for.”

— Ludwig von Mises

152. “No matter how efficient school training may be, it would only produce stagnation, orthodoxy, and rigid pedantry if there were no uncommon men pushing forward beyond the wisdom of their tutors.”

— Ludwig von Mises

153. “Changes in human conditions are brought about by the pioneering of the cleverest and most energetic men. They take the lead and the rest of mankind follows them little by little.”

— Ludwig von Mises

154. “If it is unnecessary to adjust the amount of expenditure to the means available, there is no limit to the spending of the great god State.”

— Ludwig von Mises

155. “In the case of money, subjective use-value and subjective exchange-value coincide. Both are derived from objective exchange-value, for money has no utility other than that arising from the possibility of obtaining other economic goods in exchange for it.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

157. “An essential point in the social philosophy of interventionism is the existence of an inexhaustible fund which can be squeezed forever. The whole system of interventionism collapses when the fountain is drained off: The Santa Clause principle liquidates itself.”

— Ludwig von Mises

158. “It is necessary to curb the power of government. This is the task of all constitutions, bills of rights and laws. This is the meaning of all struggles which men have fought for liberty.”

— Ludwig von Mises

159. “Socialism is the renunciation of rational economy.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

161. “It is solely bigness in business which makes it possible to supply the masses with all those products the present-day American common man does not want to do without. Luxury goods for the few can be produced in small shops. Luxury goods for the many require big business.”

— Ludwig von Mises

162. “In life everything is continually in flux.”

— Ludwig von Mises

163. “In the bureaucratic machine of socialism the way toward promotion is not achievement but the favor of the superiors.”

— Ludwig von Mises

164. “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

165. “In many fields of the administration of interventionist measures, favoritism simply cannot be avoided.”

— Ludwig von Mises

166. “Today the apologists of socialism are forced to distort facts and to misrepresent the manifest meaning of words when they want to make people believe in the compatibility of socialism and freedom.”

— Ludwig von Mises

167. “The welfare of a people lies not in casting other peoples down but in peaceful collaboration.”

— Ludwig von Mises

168. “It is untrue that some are poor because others are rich. If an order of society in which incomes were equal replaced the capitalist order, everyone would become poorer.”

— Ludwig von Mises

169. “The standard of living of the common man is higher in those countries which have the greatest number of wealthy entrepreneurs.”

— Ludwig von Mises

170. “There would not be any profits but for the eagerness of the public to acquire the merchandise offered for sale by the successful entrepreneur. But the same people who scramble for these articles vilify the businessman and call his profit ill-got.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

172. “Under bilateral competition, market-price is determined within a range whose upper limit is set by the valuations of the lowest bidder among the actual buyers and the highest offerer among the excluded would-be sellers, and whose lower limit is set by the valuations of the lowest offerer among the actual sellers and the highest bidder among the excluded would-be buyers.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

174. “The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

176. “The truth is that most people lack the intellectual ability and courage to resist a popular movement, however pernicious and ill-considered.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

178. “Human civilization is not something achieved against nature; it is rather the outcome of the working of the innate qualities of man.”

— Ludwig von Mises

179. “Keynes did not teach us how to perform the miracle of turning a stone into bread, but the not at all miraculous procedure of eating the seed corn.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

181. “Mankind does not drink alcohol because there are breweries, distilleries, and vineyards; men brew beer, distill spirits, and grow grapes because of the demand for alcoholic drinks.”

— Ludwig von Mises

182. “Innovation is the whim of an elite before it becomes a need of the public.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

185. “Peace and not war is the father of all things.”

— Ludwig von Mises

186. “Governments, political parties, pressure groups, and the bureaucrats of the educational hierarchy think they can avoid the inevitable consequences of unsuitable measures by boycotting and silencing the independent economists. But truth persists and works, even if nobody is left to utter it.”

— Ludwig von Mises

187. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

189. “The essence of democracy is not that everyone makes and administers laws but that lawgivers and rulers should be dependent on the people’s will in such a way that they may be peaceably changed if conflict occurs.”

— Ludwig von Mises

190. “In the socialist commonwealth every economic change becomes an undertaking whose success can be neither appraised in advance nor later retrospectively determined. There is only groping in the dark. Socialism is the abolition of rational economy.”

— Ludwig von Mises

191. “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

192. “Even in ancient times general recognition must have been accorded to the view which later in the shape of the maxim pecunia pecuniam parere non potest was to be the basis of all discussion of the problem of interest for hundreds and even thousands of years, and Aristotle undoubtedly did not state it in the famous passage in his Politics as a new doctrine but as a generally-accepted commonplace.2.”

— Ludwig von Mises

193. “It has always been the task of the new generation to provoke changes.”

— Ludwig von Mises

194. “It is impossible to understand the history of economic thought if one does not pay attention to the fact that economics as such is a challenge to the conceit of those in power.”

— Ludwig von Mises

195. “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

196. “Manufacturing and commercial monopolies owe their origin not to a tendency imminent in a capitalist economy but to governmental interventionist policy directed against free trade and laissez faire.”

— Ludwig von Mises

197. “Marx and Engels openly declared that the progressive income tax and the death tax are ‘economically untenable’ and that they advocated them only because ‘they necessitate further inroads’ upon the capitalist system and are ‘unavoidable’ as a means of bringing about socialism.”

— Ludwig von Mises

198. “Economics is not about things and tangible material objects; it is about men, their meanings and actions.”

— Ludwig von Mises

199. “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.”

— Ludwig von Mises

200. “Plato and Hitler were both the same kind of consistent socialists who planned also for the production of future socialists, the breeding and education of future members of society.”

— Ludwig von Mises