Top 500 Ludwig von Mises Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “Nevertheless statesmen are still greatly exercised by the problem of the international distribution of money. For hundreds of years, the Midas Theory, systematized by Mercantilism, has been the rule followed by governments in taking measures of commercial policy. In spite of Hume, Smith, and Ricardo, it still dominates men’s minds more than would be expected. Phoenix-like, it rises again and again from its own ashes.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

255. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

257. “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

258. “Whoever prefers life to death, happiness to suffering, well-being to misery must defend without compromise private ownership in the means of production.”

— Ludwig von Mises

259. “Everything brought forward in favor of Socialism during the last hundred years, in thousands of writings and speeches, all the blood which has been spilt by the supporters of Socialism, cannot make socialism workable.”

— Ludwig von Mises

260. “Socialism in Russia has not brought about an improvement in the conditions of the average man which can be compared with the improvement of conditions, during the same period, in the United States.”

— Ludwig von Mises

261. “Whoever wants peace among nations must seek to limit the state and its influence most strictly.”

— Ludwig von Mises

262. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

264. “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

265. “A free man must be able to endure it when his fellow men act and live otherwise than he considers proper. He must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police.”

— Ludwig von Mises

266. “It is evident that youth is the first victim of the trend toward bureaucratization. The young men are deprived of any opportunity to shape their own fate.”

— Ludwig von Mises

267. “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

268. “Freedom and liberty always mean freedom from police interference.”

— Ludwig von Mises

269. “There can be no freedom in art and literature where the government determines who shall create them.”

— Ludwig von Mises

270. “The boom is called good business, prosperity, and upswing. Its unavoidable aftermath, the readjustment of conditions to the real data of the market, is called crisis, slump, bad business, depression.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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271. “As soon as we surrender the principle that the state should not interfere in any questions touching on the individuals mode of life, we end by regulating and restricting the latter down to the smallest details.”

— Ludwig von Mises

272. “You call it a ‘loophole’ when the government still allows you some freedom.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

275. “The average man is both better informed and less corruptible in the decisions he makes as a consumer than as a voter at political elections.”

— Ludwig von Mises

276. “A country becomes more prosperous in proportion to the rise in the invested capital unit per unit of its population.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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277. “Government is an apparatus of compulsion and coercion.”

— Ludwig von Mises

278. “Facts per se can neither prove nor refute anything. Everything is decided by the interpretation and explanation of the facts, by the ideas and the theories.”

— Ludwig von Mises

279. “A short time ago the demagogues blamed capitalism for the poverty of the masses. Today they rather blame capitalism for the “affluence” that it bestows upon the common man.”

— Ludwig von Mises

280. “Only the naive inflationist’s could believe that government could enrich mankind through fiat money.”

— Ludwig von Mises

281. “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

282. “The masses, in their capacity as consumers, ultimately determine everybody’s revenues and wealth.”

— Ludwig von Mises

283. “Private property creates for the individual a sphere in which he is free of the state. It sets limits to the operation of the authoritarian will.”

— Ludwig von Mises

284. “What economic calculation requires is a monetary system whose functioning is not sabotaged by government interference.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

286. “Inflation is essentially antidemocratic.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

288. “Depression is the aftermath of credit expansion.”

— Ludwig von Mises

289. “If, as is generally the case, the heirs are not equal to the demands which life makes on an entrepreneur, the inherited wealth rapidly vanishes.”

— Ludwig von Mises

290. “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

291. “The riches of successful entrepreneurs is not the cause of anybody’s poverty; it is the consequence of the fact that the consumers are better supplied than they would have been in the absence of the entrepreneur’s efforts.”

— Ludwig von Mises

292. “The study of economics has been again and again led astray by the vain idea that economics must proceed according to the pattern of other sciences.”

— Ludwig von Mises

293. “Once it has been perceived that the division of labour is the essence of society, nothing remains of the antithesis between individual and society. The contradiction between individual principle and social principle disappears.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

295. “It is certain that many intellectuals envy the higher income of prosperous businessmen and that these feelings drive them toward socialism. They believe that the authorities of a socialist commonwealth would pay them higher salaries than those that they earn under capitalism.”

— Ludwig von Mises

296. “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

297. “The function of money is to facilitate the business of the market by acting as a common medium of exchange.”

— Ludwig von Mises

298. “Free markets. What does this system mean? The answer is simple: it is the market economy, it is the system in which the cooperation of individuals in the social division of labor is achieved by the market.”

— Ludwig von Mises

299. “No architect is held responsible for the behavior of those who inhabit the structure he designed.”

— Ludwig von Mises

300. “Business is a means- the only means- to increase the quantity of goods available for preserving life and rendering it more agreeable.”

— Ludwig von Mises