Top 500 Ludwig von Mises Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “The root of the evil is not the construction of new, more dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “Public opinion always wants easy money, that is, low interest rates.”

— Ludwig von Mises

214. “The uncouth hordes of common men are not fit to recognize duly the merits of those who eclipse their own wretchedness.”

— Ludwig von Mises

215. “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

216. “The Pseudo-liberals monopolize the teaching jobs at many universities. Only men who agree with them are appointed as teachers and instructors of the social sciences, and only textbooks supporting their ideas are used.”

— Ludwig von Mises

217. “The vain arrogance of the literati and the Bohemian artists dismisses the activities of the businessmen as unintellectual money-making. The truth is that the entrepreneurs and promoters display more intellectual faculties and intuition than the average writer and painter. The inferiority of many self-styled intellectuals manifests itself precisely in the fact that they fail to recognize what capacity and reasoning power are required to develop and to operate successfully a business enterprise.”

— Ludwig von Mises

218. “In the world of reality, life, and human action there is no such thing as interests independent of ideas, preceding them temporarily and logically. What a man considers his interest is the result of his ideas.”

— Ludwig von Mises

219. “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

220. “The concept of a ‘just’ or ‘fair’ price is devoid of any scientific meaning; it is a disguise for wishes, a striving for a state of affairs different from reality.”

— Ludwig von Mises

221. “The only source from which an entrepreneurs profits stem is his ability to anticipate better than other people the future demand of the consumers.”

— Ludwig von Mises

222. “In order to succeed in business a man does not need a degree from a school of business administration. These schools train the subalterns for routine jobs. They certainly do not train entrepreneurs.”

— Ludwig von Mises

223. “Lenin’s ideal was to build a nation’s production effort according to the model of the post office.”

— Ludwig von Mises

224. “People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests.”

— Ludwig von Mises

225. “It is labor alone that is productive: it creates wealth and therewith lays the outward foundations for the inward flowering of man.”

— Ludwig von Mises

226. “This is the difference between slavery and freedom. The slave must do what his superior orders him to do, but the free citizen-and this is what freedom means-is in a position to choose his own way of life.”

— Ludwig von Mises

227. “If some peoples pretend that history or geography gives them the right to subjugate other races, nations, or peoples, there can be no peace.”

— Ludwig von Mises

228. “The class of those who have the ability to think their own thoughts is separated by an unbridgeable gulf from the class of those who cannot.”

— Ludwig von Mises

229. “The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution.”

— Ludwig von Mises

230. “Every collectivist assumes a different source for the collective will, according to his own political, religious and national convictions.”

— Ludwig von Mises

231. “The greater productivity of work under the division of labor is a unifying influence. It leads men to regard each other as comrades in a joint struggle for welfare, rather than as competitors in a struggle for existence. It makes friends out of enemies, peace out of war, society out of individuals.”

— Ludwig von Mises

232. “Those politicians, professors and union bosses who curse big business are fighting for a lower standard of living.”

— Ludwig von Mises

233. “Anticapitalism can maintain itself in existence only by sponging on capitalism.”

— Ludwig von Mises

234. “Spiritual movements are revolts of thought against inertia, of the few against the many; of those who because they are strong in spirit are strongest alone against those who can express themselves only in the mass and the mob, and who are significant only because they are numerous.”

— Ludwig von Mises

Featured in: Strong Quotes

235. “Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life that can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends.”

— Ludwig von Mises

236. “In all countries with a settled bureaucracy people used to say: The cabinets come and go, but the bureaus remain.”

— Ludwig von Mises

Featured in: Country Quotes

237. “Nothing, however, is as ill founded as the assertion of the alleged equality of all members of the human race.”

— Ludwig von Mises

238. “Human actions consist always in a choice between two goods or two evils which are not deemed equivalent. Where there is perfect equivalence, man stays neutral; and no action results. But what is good and what is better, or what is bad and what is worse, is decided according to subjective standards, different with different individuals, and changing with the same individuals according to circumstances. As.”

— Ludwig von Mises

239. “There is no remedy for the inefficiency of public management.”

— Ludwig von Mises

240. “Despots and democratic majorities are drunk with power.”

— Ludwig von Mises

241. “The nationalist, too, affirms Socialism, and objects only to its Internationalism. He wishes to combine Socialism with the ideas of Imperialism and the struggle against foreign nations. He is a national, not an international socialist; but he, also, approves of the essential principles of Socialism.”

— Ludwig von Mises

242. “War can really cause no economic boom, at least not directly, since an increase in wealth never does result from destruction of goods.”

— Ludwig von Mises

243. “For hundreds, even thousands, of years, people completely failed to see that variations in the objective exchange-value of money could be induced by monetary factors. They tried to explain all variations of prices exclusively from the commodity side.”

— Ludwig von Mises

244. “The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning.”

— Ludwig von Mises

245. “If the government objects to monopoly prices for new inventions, it should stop granting patents.”

— Ludwig von Mises

246. “Continued adherence to a policy of compulsory education is utterly incompatible with efforts to establish lasting peace.”

— Ludwig von Mises

247. “Nobody can be at the same time a correct bureaucrat and an innovator.”

— Ludwig von Mises

248. “There were nowhere more docile disciples of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin than the Nazis were.”

— Ludwig von Mises

249. “The development of capitalism consists in everyone having the right to serve the consumer better or more cheaply.”

— Ludwig von Mises

250. “Democracy is not a good that people can enjoy without trouble. It is, on the contrary, a treasure that must be daily defended and conquered anew by strenuous effort.”

— Ludwig von Mises