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

202. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

204. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

206. “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

207. “Capitalism gave the world what it needed, a higher standard of living for a steadily increasing number of people.”

— Ludwig von Mises

208. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

210. “Continued inflation inevitably leads to catastrophe.”

— Ludwig von Mises

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

215. “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

216. “The worst law is better than bureaucratic tyranny.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

222. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

225. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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233. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

236. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

240. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

243. “The body of economic knowledge is an essential element in the structure of human civilization; it is the foundation upon which modern industrialism and all the moral, intellectual, technological, and therapeutical achievements of the last centuries have been built.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

247. “The first socialists were the intellectuals; they, and not the masses, are the backbone of Socialism.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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248. “The policy of letting the free market determine the height of wage rates is the only reasonable and successful full-employment policy.”

— Ludwig von Mises

249. “As soon as the economic freedom which the market economy grants to its members is removed, all political liberties and bills of rights become humbug.”

— Ludwig von Mises

250. “Under the gold standard gold is money and money is gold. It is immaterial whether or not the laws assign legal tender quality only to gold coins minted by the government.”

— Ludwig von Mises