Top 500 Ludwig von Mises Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “Those politicians, professors and union bosses who curse big business are fighting for a lower standard of living.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

203. “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

204. “Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.”

— Ludwig von Mises

205. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

207. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

214. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

216. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

218. “Romanticism is man’s revolt against reason, as well as against the condition under which nature has compelled him to live.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

225. “As the prosperity of the nation and the height of wage rates depend on a continual increase in the capital invested in its plants, mines and farms, it is one of the foremost tasks of good government to remove all obstacles that hinder the accumulation and investment of new capital.”

— Ludwig von Mises

226. “The bureaucrat is not free to aim at improvement. He is bound to obey rules and regulations established by a superior body. He has no right to embark upon innovations if his superiors do not approve of them. His duty and his virtue is to be obedient.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

228. “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

229. “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

230. “Continued inflation inevitably leads to catastrophe.”

— Ludwig von Mises

231. “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

232. “Since nobody is in a position to substitute his own value judgments for those of the acting individual, it is vain to pass judgment on other people’s aims and volitions. No man is qualified to declare what would make another man happier or less discontented.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

234. “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

235. “Inflationism is that monetary policy that seeks to increase the quantity of money.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

237. “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

238. “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

239. “Every specific tax, as well as the nation’s whole tax system, becomes self-defeating above a certain height of the rates.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

241. “No very deep knowledge of economics is usually needed for grasping the immediate effects of a measure; but the task of economics is to foretell the remoter effects, and so to allow us to avoid such acts as attempt to remedy a present ill by sowing the seeds of a much greater ill for the future.”

— Ludwig von Mises

242. “The prerequisite for more economic equality in the world is industrialization. And this is possible only through increased capital investment, increased capital accumulation.”

— Ludwig von Mises

243. “The market system makes all producers responsible to the consumer.”

— Ludwig von Mises

244. “The continued existence of society depends upon private property.”

— Ludwig von Mises

245. “Almost all the fathers of socialism were members of the upper middle class or of the professions.”

— Ludwig von Mises

246. “The boom produces impoverishment. But still more disastrous are its moral ravages. It makes people despondent and dispirited. The more optimistic they were under the illusory prosperity of the boom, the greater is their despair and their feeling of frustration.”

— Ludwig von Mises

247. “A genius is always a teacher, never a pupil; he is always self-made.”

— Ludwig von Mises

248. “The final outcome of the credit expansion is general impoverishment.”

— Ludwig von Mises

249. “The masses favor socialism because they trust the socialist propaganda of the intellectuals. The intellectuals, not the populace, are molding public opinion.”

— Ludwig von Mises

250. “Capitalism has improved the standard of living of the wage earners to an unprecedented extent. The average American family enjoys today amenities of which, only a hundred years ago, not even the richest nabobs dreamed.”

— Ludwig von Mises