Top 500 Ludwig von Mises Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “We must fight all that we dislike in public life. We must substitute better ideas for wrong ideas.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

354. “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

355. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “He who serves the public best, makes the highest profits.”

— Ludwig von Mises

363. “The Santa Claus principle liquidates itself.”

— Ludwig von Mises

364. “Competition on the market aims at assigning to every individual that function in the social system in which he can render to all his fellow men the most valuable of the services he is able to perform.”

— Ludwig von Mises

365. “The attainment of the economic aims of man presupposes peace.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

367. “Up to now in the West none of the apostles of stabilization and petrification has succeeded in wiping out the individuais innate disposition to think and to apply to ali problems the yardstick of reason. This alone, and no more, history and philosophy can assert in dealing with doctrines that claim to know exactly what the future has in store for mankind.”

— Ludwig von Mises

368. “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

369. “The illusiveness of this concept of national income is to be seen in its dependence on changes in the purchasing power of the monetary unit. The more inflation progresses, the higher rises the national income.”

— Ludwig von Mises

370. “The average American worker enjoys amenities for which Croesus, Crassus, the Medici, and Louis XIV would have envied him.”

— Ludwig von Mises

371. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

373. “Religious wars are the most terrible wars because they are waged without any prospect of conciliation.”

— Ludwig von Mises

374. “All attempts to coerce the living will of human beings into the service of something they do not want must fail.”

— Ludwig von Mises

375. “The history of mankind is the history of ideas.”

— Ludwig von Mises

376. “In Nature too, much may exist that we do not like. But we cannot change the essential character of natural events. If, for example, someone thinks – and there are some who have maintained as much – that the way in which man ingests his food, digests it, and incorporates it into his body is disgusting, one cannot argue the point with him. One must say to him: There is only this way or starvation.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

378. “Depreciation of money can benefit debtors only when it is unforeseen. If inflationary measures and a reduction of the value of money are expected, then those who lend money will demand higher interest in order to compensate their probable loss of capital, and those who seek loans will be prepared to pay the higher interest because they have a prospect of gaining on capital account.”

— Ludwig von Mises

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

383. “Nevertheless statesmen are still greatly exercised by the problem of the international distribution of money. For hundreds of years, the Midas Theory, systematized by Mercantilism, has been the rule followed by governments in taking measures of commercial policy. In spite of Hume, Smith, and Ricardo, it still dominates men’s minds more than would be expected. Phoenix-like, it rises again and again from its own ashes.”

— Ludwig von Mises

384. “The most successful businessmen were often uneducated when measured by the scholastic standards of the teaching profession. But they were equal to their social function of adjusting production to the most urgent demand. Because of these merits the consumers chose them for business leadership.”

— Ludwig von Mises

385. “When individuals are exchanging present goods against future goods they do not take account in their valuations of Variations in the objective exchange-value of money. Lenders and borrowers are not in the habit of allowing for possible future fluctuations in the objective exchange-value of money.”

— Ludwig von Mises

386. “Big business always serve – directly or indirectly – the masses.”

— Ludwig von Mises

387. “Against nature and within nature there is no freedom.”

— Ludwig von Mises

388. “A metallic money, the augmentation or diminution of the quantity of metal available for which is independent of deliberate human intervention, is becoming the modern monetary ideal. The significance of adherence to a metallic-money system lies in the freedom of the value of money from State influence that such a system guarantees.”

— Ludwig von Mises

389. “Big business depends entirely on the patronage of those who buy its products: the biggest enterprises loses its power and its influence when it loses its customers.”

— Ludwig von Mises

390. “The avowed aim of all utopian movements is to put an end to history and to establish a final and permanent calm.”

— Ludwig von Mises

391. “The consumers suffer when the laws of the country prevent the most efficient entrepreneurs from expanding the sphere of their activities. What made some enterprises develop into “big business” was precisely their success in filling best the demand of the masses.”

— Ludwig von Mises

392. “In a game there are winners and losers. But a business deal is always advantageous for both parties. If both the buyer and the seller were not to consider the transaction as the most advantageous action they could choose under the prevailing conditions, they would not enter into the deal.”

— Ludwig von Mises

393. “The unpopularity of economics is the result of its analysis of the effects of privileges. It is impossible to invalidate the economists demonstration that all privileges hurt the interests of the rest of the nation or at least a great part of it.”

— Ludwig von Mises

394. “The tow pillars of democratic government are the primacy of the law and the budget.”

— Ludwig von Mises

395. “Nobody is in a position to decree what should make a fellow man happier.”

— Ludwig von Mises

396. “There is no western, capitalistic country in which the conditions of the masses have not improved in an unprecedented way.”

— Ludwig von Mises

397. “Sovereignty must not be used for inflicting harm on anyone, whether citizen or foreigner.”

— Ludwig von Mises

398. “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

399. “The living is not perfect because it is liable to change; the dead is not perfect because it does not live.”

— Ludwig von Mises

400. “It is the beginning of the ‘demonetization’ of the notes. The process is hastened by its panic-like character. It may be possible once, twice, perhaps even three or four times, to allay the fears of the public; but eventually the affair must run its course and then there is no longer any going back. Once the depreciation is proceeding so rapidly that sellers have to reckon with considerable losses even if they buy again as quickly as is possible, then the position of the currency is hopeless.”

— Ludwig von Mises