Top 500 Ludwig von Mises Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “The worst law is better than bureaucratic tyranny.”

— Ludwig von Mises

152. “The elimination of profit, whatever methods may be resorted to for its execution, must transform society into a senseless jumble. It would create poverty for all.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

154. “The government pretends to be endowed with the mystical power to accord favors out of an inexhaustible horn of plenty. It is both omniscient and omnipotent. It can by a magic wand create happiness and abundance. The truth is the government cannot give if it does not take from somebody.”

— Ludwig von Mises

155. “A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets.”

— Ludwig von Mises

156. “Nothing is more calculated to make a demagogue popular than a constantly reiterated demand for heavy taxes on the rich. Capital levies and high income taxes on the larger incomes are extraordinarily popular with the masses, who do not have to pay them.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

158. “It is the consumers who make poor people rich and rich people poor.”

— Ludwig von Mises

159. “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

160. “Scientific criticism has no nobler task than to shatter false beliefs.”

— Ludwig von Mises

161. “The aim of the popularization of economic studies is not to make every man an economist. The idea is to equip the citizen for his civic functions in community life.”

— Ludwig von Mises

162. “The characteristic feature of a free society is that it can function in spite of the fact that its members disagree in many judgments of value. Freedom really means the freedom to make mistakes.”

— Ludwig von Mises

163. “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

164. “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

165. “A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.”

— Ludwig von Mises

166. “The democracy of the market consists in the fact that people themselves make their choices and that no dictator has the power to force them to submit to his value judgments.”

— Ludwig von Mises

167. “Every step toward the elimination of profit is progress on the way toward social disintegration.”

— Ludwig von Mises

168. “There is simply no other choice than this: either to abstain from interference in the free play of the market, or to delegate the entire management of production and distribution to the government. Either capitalism or socialism: there exists no middle way.”

— Ludwig von Mises

169. “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

170. “Neither the entrepreneurs nor the farmers nor the capitalists determine what has to be produced. The consumers do that.”

— Ludwig von Mises

171. “Do the American voters know that the unprecedented improvement in their standard of living that the last hundred years brought was the result of the steady rise in the per-head quota of capital invested? Do they realize that every measure leading to capital decumulation jeopardizes their prosperity?”

— Ludwig von Mises

172. “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

173. “What is needed for a sound expansion of production is additional capital goods, not money or fiduciary media. The credit expansion is built on the sands of banknotes and deposits. It must collapse.”

— Ludwig von Mises

174. “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

175. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

177. “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

178. “The balance-of-payments theory forgets that the volume of foreign trade is completely dependent upon prices; that neither exportation nor importation can occur if there are no differences in prices to make trade profitable.”

— Ludwig von Mises

179. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

183. “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

184. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

187. “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

188. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

192. “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

193. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

196. “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

197. “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

198. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

200. “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