Top 500 Ludwig von Mises Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “A short time ago the demagogues blamed capitalism for the poverty of the masses. Today they rather blame capitalism for the “affluence” that it bestows upon the common man.”

— Ludwig von Mises

352. “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

353. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

356. “The Santa Claus principle liquidates itself.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

364. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

369. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

380. “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

381. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— 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. “Doctrines which can stand the trial of logic and reason can do without persecuting skeptics. This.”

— Ludwig von Mises

393. “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

394. “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

395. “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

396. “The biological equipment of a man rigidly restricts the field in which he can serve.”

— Ludwig von Mises

397. “The methods of the natural sciences cannot be applied to human behavior because this behaviorlacks the peculiarity that characterizes events in the field of the natural sciences, viz., regularity.”

— Ludwig von Mises

398. “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

399. “The most serious dangers for American freedom and the American way of life do not come from without.”

— Ludwig von Mises

400. “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