Top 500 Ludwig von Mises Quotes (2023 Update)
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301. “The function of money is to facilitate the business of the market by acting as a common medium of exchange.”

— Ludwig von Mises

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “It is common with narrow-minded people to reflect upon every respect in which other people differ from themselves. The.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

312. “All almsgiving inevitably tends to pauperize the recipient.”

— Ludwig von Mises

313. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

315. “Even in ancient times general recognition must have been accorded to the view which later in the shape of the maxim pecunia pecuniam parere non potest was to be the basis of all discussion of the problem of interest for hundreds and even thousands of years, and Aristotle undoubtedly did not state it in the famous passage in his Politics as a new doctrine but as a generally-accepted commonplace.2.”

— Ludwig von Mises

316. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

318. “State interference in economic life, which calls itself economic policy, has done nothing but destroy economic life. Prohibitions and regulations have by their general obstructive tendency fostered the growth of the spirit of wastefulness.”

— Ludwig von Mises

319. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

321. “Determinants of prices have their effect only through the medium of the subjective estimates of individuals; and the extent to which any given factor influences these subjective estimates can never be predicted.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

323. “Every man aims at avoiding what causes him pain; the activities of government ultimately consist in the infliction of pain. All great achievements of mankind were the product of a spontaneous effort on the part of individuals; government substitutes coercion for voluntary action.”

— Ludwig von Mises

324. “The balance-of-payments theory forgets that the volume of foreign trade is completely dependent upon prices; that neither exportation nor importation can occur if there are no differences in prices to make trade profitable.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

327. “A wealthy man can preserve his wealth only by continuing to serve the consumers in the most efficient way.”

— Ludwig von Mises

328. “The valuations which result in determination of definite prices are different. Each party attaches a higher value to the good he receives than to that he gives away. The exchange ratio, the price, is not the product of equality of valuation, but on the contrary, the product of a discrepancy in valuation.”

— Ludwig von Mises

329. “There is no room at all for independent enterprise under any variety of State Socialism. Prices are to be regulated authoritatively; authority is to fix what is to be produced, and how, and in what quantities. There is to be no speculation, no ‘excessive’ profit, no loss. There is to be no innovation unless it be decreed by authority. The official is to direct and supervise everything.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

331. “The Santa Claus principle liquidates itself.”

— Ludwig von Mises

332. “The consumers are asking for, they lose their office. Their task is service to the consumer. Profit and loss are the instruments by means of which the consumers keep a tight rein on all business activities.”

— Ludwig von Mises

333. “Scientific research sooner or later, but inevitably, encounters something ultimately given that it cannot trace back to something else of which it would appear as the regular or necessary derivative. Scientific progress consists in pushing further back this ultimately given.”

— Ludwig von Mises

334. “History makes one wise, but not competent to solve concrete problems.”

— Ludwig von Mises

335. “Within the market society each serves all his fellow citizens and each is served by them. It is a system of mutual exchange of services and commodities, a mutual giving, and receiving.”

— Ludwig von Mises

336. “It is the worst of all superstitions to assume that the epistemological characteristics of one branch of knowledge must necessarily be applicable to any other branch.”

— Ludwig von Mises

337. “The market economy as such does not respect political frontiers. Its field is the world.”

— Ludwig von Mises

338. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

341. “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

342. “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

343. “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

344. “The characteristic mark of economic history under capitalism is unceasing economic progress, a steady increase in the quantity of capital goods available, and a continuous trend toward an improvement in the general standard of living.”

— Ludwig von Mises

345. “What governments call international monetary cooperation is concerted action for the sake of credit expansion.”

— Ludwig von Mises

346. “This dilettantish inability to comprehend the essential issues of the conduct of production affairs is not only manifested in the writings of Marx and Engels. It permeates no less the contributions of contemporary pseudo-economics.”

— Ludwig von Mises

347. “The socialist system, however, forbids this fundamental freedom to choose one’s own career. Under socialist conditions, there is only one economic authority, and it has the right to determine all matters concerning production.”

— Ludwig von Mises

348. “The only means to well-being is to increase the quantity of products. This is what business aims at.”

— Ludwig von Mises

349. “By ‘the objective exchange-value of money’ we are accordingly to understand the possibility of obtaining a certain quantity of other economic goods in exchange for a given quantity of money; and by ‘the price of money’ this actual quantity of other goods.”

— Ludwig von Mises

350. “The member of a contractual society is free because he serves others only in serving himself. What restrains him is only the inevitable natural phenomenon of scarcity.”

— Ludwig von Mises