Top 500 Ludwig von Mises Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “What pushes the masses into the camp of socialism is, even more than the illusion that socialism will make them richer, the expectation that it will curb all those who are better than they themselves are.”

— Ludwig von Mises

302. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

304. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

307. “For hundreds, even thousands, of years, people completely failed to see that variations in the objective exchange-value of money could be induced by monetary factors. They tried to explain all variations of prices exclusively from the commodity side.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

315. “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

316. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

322. “Nobody can be at the same time a correct bureaucrat and an innovator.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

326. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

335. “Only very few men have the gift of thinking new and original ideas and of changing the traditional body of creeds and doctrines.”

— Ludwig von Mises

336. “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

337. “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

338. “What is thus improperly regarded as profit, instead of as part of capital, is consumed by the entrepreneur or passed on either to the consumer in the form of price-reductions that would not otherwise have been made or to the labourer in the form of higher wages, and the government proceeds to tax it as income or profits. In any case, consumption of capital results from the fact that monetary depreciation falsifies capital accounting.”

— Ludwig von Mises

339. “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

340. “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

341. “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

342. “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

343. “The Marxians love of democratic institutions was a stratagem only, a pious fraud for the deception of the masses. Within a socialist community there is no room left for freedom.”

— Ludwig von Mises

344. “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

345. “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

346. “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

347. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

349. “Economic theory has demonstrated in an irrefutable way that a prosperity created by an expansionist monetary and credit policy is illusory and must end in a slump, an economic crisis.”

— Ludwig von Mises

350. “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