Top 500 Ludwig von Mises Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “All attempts to coerce the living will of human beings into the service of something they do not want must fail.”

— Ludwig von Mises

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “One has to recognize that science is not metaphysics, and certainly not mysticism; it can never bring us the illumination and the satisfaction experienced by one enraptured in ecstasy. Science is sobriety and clarity of conception, not intoxicated vision.”

— Ludwig von Mises

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “There is no other planning for freedom and general welfare than to let the market system work.”

— Ludwig von Mises

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

376. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

379. “For the etatist, money is a creature of the State, and the esteem in which money is held is the economic expression of the respect or prestige enjoyed by the State. The more powerful and the richer the State, the better its money. Thus, during the War, it was asserted that ‘the monetary standard of the victors’ would ultimately be the best money. Yet victory and defeat on the battlefield can exercise only an indirect influence on the value of money.”

— Ludwig von Mises

380. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

389. “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

390. “What impels every man to the utmost exertion in the service of his fellow man. Is, in the market not compulsion on the part of gendarmes, hangmen and penal courts, it is self interest.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

393. “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

394. “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

395. “Etatism, as a theory, is the doctrine of the omnipotence of the State, and, as a policy, the attempt to regulate all mundane affairs by authoritative commandment and prohibition. The ideal society of etatism is a particular sort of socialistic community; it is usual in discussions involving this ideal society to speak of State Socialism, or, in some connexions, of Christian Socialism.”

— Ludwig von Mises

396. “The Santa Claus principle liquidates itself.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

398. “Where the currency depreciation is a result of government inflation carried out by the issue of notes, it is possible to avert its disastrous effect on economic calculation by conducting all bookkeeping in a stable money instead. But so far as the depreciation is a depreciation of gold, the world money, there is no such easy way out.”

— Ludwig von Mises

399. “It is not the poverty of individuals and the community, not indebtedness to foreign nations, not the unfavourableness of the conditions of production, that force up the rate of exchange, but inflation.”

— Ludwig von Mises

400. “The comparatively greater prosperity of the United States is an outcome of the fact that the New Deal did not come in 1900 or 1910, but only in 1933.”

— Ludwig von Mises