Top 500 Ludwig von Mises Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “There were nowhere more docile disciples of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin than the Nazis were.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

256. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

258. “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

259. “In spite of the anticapitalistic policies of all governments and of almost all political parties, the capitalist mode of production.”

— Ludwig von Mises

260. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

263. “Two hundred years ago, before the advent of capitalism, a man’s social status was fixed from the beginning to the end of his life; he inherited it from his ancestors and it never changed.”

— Ludwig von Mises

264. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

270. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

273. “Inflation is essentially antidemocratic.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

275. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

279. “It is not conclusive proof of a doctrine’s correctness that its adversaries use the police, the hangman, and violent mobs to fight it. But it is a proof of the fact that those taking recourse to violent oppression are in their subconscious convinced of the untenability of their own doctrines.”

— Ludwig von Mises

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things.”

— Ludwig von Mises

284. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

286. “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

287. “The tricks and artifices of advertising are available to the seller of the better product no less than to the seller of the poorer product. But only the former enjoys the advantage derived from the better quality of his product.”

— Ludwig von Mises

288. “There is not the slightest analogy between playing games and the conduct of business within a market society. The card player wins money by outsmarting his antagonist. The businessman makes money by supplying customers with goods they want to acquire.”

— Ludwig von Mises

289. “Taxing profits is tantamount to taxing success.”

— Ludwig von Mises

290. “Speculation does not determine prices; it has to accept the prices that are determined in the market. I ts efforts are directed to correctly estimating future price-situations, and to acting accordingly. The influence of speculation cannot alter the average level of prices over a given period; what it can do is to diminish the gap between the highest and the lowest prices.”

— Ludwig von Mises

291. “Some think that they will exercise power for the general good, but that is what all those with power have believed. Power is evil in itself, regardless of who exercises it.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

293. “Professor von Mises has a splendid analytical mind and an admirable passion for liberty; but as a student of human nature he is worse than null and as a debater he is of Hyde Park standard.”

— Ludwig von Mises

294. “Under capitalism the common man enjoys amenities which in ages gone by were unknown and therefore inaccessible even to the richest people.”

— Ludwig von Mises

295. “Fortunes cannot grow; someone has to increase them.”

— Ludwig von Mises

296. “The common man is the sovereign consumer whose buying or abstention from buying ultimately determines what should be produced and in what quantity and quality.”

— Ludwig von Mises

297. “Where there is no market economy, the best intentioned provisions of constitutions and laws remain a dead letter.”

— Ludwig von Mises

298. “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

299. “On the unhampered market there prevails an irresistible tendency to employ every factor of production for the best possible satisfaction of the most urgent needs of the consumers. If the government interfered with this process, it can only impair satisfaction; it can never improve it.”

— Ludwig von Mises

300. “Reason is the main resource of man in his struggle for survival.”

— Ludwig von Mises