Top 500 Ludwig von Mises Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “In spite of the anticapitalistic policies of all governments and of almost all political parties, the capitalist mode of production.”

— Ludwig von Mises

302. “The people of the United States are more prosperous than the inhabitants of all other countries because their government embarked later than the governments in other parts of the world upon the policy of obstructing business.”

— Ludwig von Mises

303. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

311. “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

312. “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

313. “Daily experience proves clearly to everybody but the most bigoted fanatics of socialism that governmental management is inefficient and wasteful.”

— Ludwig von Mises

314. “What mankind needs today is liberation from the rule of nonsensical slogans and a return to sound reasoning.”

— Ludwig von Mises

315. “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

316. “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

317. “Wars of aggression are popular nowadays with those nations convinced that only victory and conquest could improve their material well-being.”

— Ludwig von Mises

318. “The philosophy underlying the system of progressive taxation is that the income and wealth of the well-to-do classes can be freely tapped. What the advocates of these tax rates fail to realize is that the greater part of the incomes taxed away would not have been consumed but saved and invested.”

— Ludwig von Mises

319. “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

320. “When we call a capitalist society a consumers democracy we mean that the power to dispose of the means of production, which belongs to the entrepreneurs and capitalists, can only be acquired by means of the consumers ballot, held daily in the marketplace.”

— Ludwig von Mises

321. “In the long run the ideas of the majority, however detrimental they may be, will carry on. The future of mankind depends on the ability of the elite to influence public opinion in the right direction.”

— Ludwig von Mises

322. “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

323. “The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state.”

— Ludwig von Mises

324. “This civilization was able to spring into existence because the peoples were dominated by ideas which were the application of the teachings of economics to the problems of economic policy. It will and must perish if the nations continue to pursue the course which they entered upon under the spell of doctrines rejecting economic thinking.”

— Ludwig von Mises

325. “Common man does not speculate about the great problems. With regard to them he relies upon other people’s authority, he behaves as “every decent fellow must behave,” he is like a sheep in the herd. It.”

— Ludwig von Mises

326. “If men do not now succeed in abolishing war, civilization and mankind are doomed.”

— Ludwig von Mises

327. “In relation to the immense sacrifices that the state demands of the individual through the blood tax, it seems rather incidental whether it compensates the soldier more or less abundantly for the loss of time that he suffers from his military-service obligation.”

— Ludwig von Mises

328. “Those fighting for free enterprise and free competition do not defend the interests of those rich today. They want a free hand left to unknown men who will be the entrepreneurs of tomorrow and whose ingenuity will make the life of coming generations more agreeable. They want the way left open to further economic improvements. They are the spokesmen of progress.”

— Ludwig von Mises

329. “Action is an attempt to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory one. We call such a willfully induced alteration an exchange.”

— Ludwig von Mises

330. “All this talk: the state should do this or that, ultimately means: the police should force consumers to behave otherwise than they would behave spontaneously.”

— Ludwig von Mises

331. “This, then, is freedom in the external life of man-that he is independent of the arbitrary power of his fellows.”

— Ludwig von Mises

332. “He who disdains the fall in infant mortality and the gradual disappearance of famines and plagues may cast the first stone upon the materialism of the economists.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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333. “Only one thing can conquer war-that attitude of mind which can see nothing in war but destruction and annihilation...”

— Ludwig von Mises

334. “The policies advocated by the welfare school remove the incentive to saving on the part of private citizens.”

— Ludwig von Mises

335. “Interventionism cannot be considered as an economic system destined to stay. It is a method for the transformation of capitalism into socialism by a series of successive steps.”

— Ludwig von Mises

336. “What is lacking to the underdeveloped nations is not knowledge, but capital.”

— Ludwig von Mises

337. “The vigorous man industriously striving for the improvement of his condition acts neither more nor less than the lethargic man who sluggishly takes things as they come. For to do nothing and to be idle are also action, they too determine the course of events.”

— Ludwig von Mises

338. “The better an entrepreneur succeeds, the more is he vilified and themore is he soaked by taxation.”

— Ludwig von Mises

339. “What counts alone is the innovator, the dissenter, the harbinger of things unheard of, the man who rejects the traditional standards and aims at substituting new values and ideas for old ones.”

— Ludwig von Mises

340. “Capitalists have the tendency to move toward those countries in which there is plenty of labor available and at which labor is reasonable. And by the fact that they bring capital into these countries, they bring about a trend toward higher wage rates.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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341. “War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.”

— Ludwig von Mises

342. “We must fight all that we dislike in public life. We must substitute better ideas for wrong ideas.”

— Ludwig von Mises

343. “Stable government requires the free consent of those ruled. Tyranny, even the tyranny of benevolent despots, cannot bring lasting peace and prosperity. There.”

— Ludwig von Mises

344. “Perhaps there are somewhere in the infinite universe beings whose minds outrank our minds to the same extent as our minds surpass those of the insects. Perhaps there will once somewhere live beings who will look upon us with the same condescension as we look upon amoebae.”

— Ludwig von Mises

345. “History cannot teach us any general rule, principle, or law. There is no means to abstract from a historical experience a posteriori any theories or theorems concerning human conduct and policies. The.”

— Ludwig von Mises

346. “Seen from the point of view of the particular group interests of the bureaucrats, every measure that makes the government’s payroll swell is progress.”

— Ludwig von Mises

347. “Each epoch has found in the Gospels what it sought to find there, and has overlooked what it wished to overlook.”

— Ludwig von Mises

348. “Modern society, based as it is on the division of labor, can be preserved only under conditions of lasting peace.”

— Ludwig von Mises

349. “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.”

— Ludwig von Mises

350. “No one should expect that any logical argument or any experience could ever shake the almost religious fervor of those who believe in salvation through spending and credit expansion.”

— Ludwig von Mises