Top 500 Ludwig von Mises Quotes (2023 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

354. “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

355. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— 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. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

371. “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

372. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

379. “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

380. “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

381. “Government is a guarantor of liberty and is compatible with liberty only if its range is adequately restricted to the preservation of what is called economic freedom.”

— Ludwig von Mises

382. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

384. “A citizen who casts his ballot without having to the best of his abilities studied as much economics as he can fails in his civic duties.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

387. “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

388. “To assign to everybody his proper place in society is the task of the consumers. Their buying and abstention from buying is instrumental in determining each individual’s social position.”

— Ludwig von Mises

389. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

391. “The public firm can nowhere maintain itself in free competition with the private firm; it is possible today only where it has a monopoly that excludes competition. Even that alone is evidence of its lesser economic productivity.”

— Ludwig von Mises

392. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

399. “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

400. “They did not suffer shipwreck because the entrepreneurs were not public-spirited, as the socialist-etatistic legend has it. They were bound to fail because the economic organization based upon division of labour and private property in the means of production can function only so long as price-determination in the market is free.”

— Ludwig von Mises