Top 500 Ludwig von Mises Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

303. “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

304. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

315. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

317. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

323. “For it is an essential difference between capitalist and socialist production that under capitalism men provide for themselves, while under Socialism they are provided for.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

325. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

327. “Socialism and interventionism. Both have in common the goal of subordinating the individual unconditionally to the state.”

— Ludwig von Mises

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

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

— 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. “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

334. “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

335. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

340. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

342. “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

343. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

345. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

347. “The essence of Keynesianism is its complete failure to conceive the role that saving and capital accumulation play in the improvement of economic conditions.”

— Ludwig von Mises

348. “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

349. “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

350. “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