Top 500 Ludwig von Mises Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “The only means to well-being is to increase the quantity of products. This is what business aims at.”

— Ludwig von Mises

402. “The prevailing legal and moral views of a time are held not only by those whom they benefit but by those, too, who appear to suffer from them. Their domination is expressed in that fact- that the people from whom they claim sacrifice accept them.”

— Ludwig von Mises

403. “To recapitulate: the exchange-ratio subsisting between commodities and money is everywhere the same. But men and their wants are not everywhere the same, and neither are commodities. Only if these distinctions are ignored is it possible to speak of local differences in the purchasing power of money or to say that living is dearer in one place than in another.”

— Ludwig von Mises

404. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

406. “But when States did debase the coinage, it was always from purely fiscal motives. The government needed financial help, that was all; it was not concerned with questions of currency policy.”

— Ludwig von Mises

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

413. “Production is not something physical, material, and external; it is a spiritual and intellectual phenomenon.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

415. “The characteristic feature of capitalism that distinguishes it from pre-capitalist methods of production was its new principle of marketing. Capitalism is not simply mass production, but mass production to satisfy the needs of the masses.”

— Ludwig von Mises

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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420. “American authors or scientists are prone to consider the wealthy businessman as a barbarian, as a man exclusively intent upon making money.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

422. “Nobody ever recommended a dictatorship aiming at ends other than those he himself approved. He who advocates dictatorship always advocates the unrestricted rule of his own will.”

— Ludwig von Mises

423. “What matters is not the allocation of portions out of a fund presented to man by nature. The problem is rather to further those social institutions which enable people to continue and to enlarge the production of all those things which they need.”

— Ludwig von Mises

424. “The aim was to regulate the value of money by increasing or diminishing the quantity of it. The effects of these measures appeared to provide an inductive proof of the correctness of this superficial version of the Quantity Theory, and incidentally concealed the weaknesses of its logic.”

— Ludwig von Mises

425. “That the social life of human beings is subject to definite limitations; that it is governed by a set of laws that are comparable with those of Nature; these are notions that are unknown to the etatist. For the etatist, everything is a question of Macht – power, force, might. And his conception of Macht is crudely materialistic.”

— Ludwig von Mises

426. “Political ideas that have dominated the public mind for decades cannot be refuted through rational arguments. They must run their course in life and cannot collapse otherwise than in great catastrophe...”

— Ludwig von Mises

427. “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

428. “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

429. “Public opinion takes no offense at the endeavors of farmers, workers, clerks, teachers, doctors, ministers, and people from many other callings to earn as much as they can. But it censures the capitalists and entrepreneurs for their greed.”

— Ludwig von Mises

430. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

432. “It is not easy to determine whether there are any who still adhere in good faith to the doctrine that traces back the depreciation of money to the activity of speculators. The doctrine is an indispensable instrument of the lowest form of demagogy; it is the resource of governments in search of a scapegoat. There are scarcely any independent writers nowadays who defend it; those who support it are paid to do so.”

— Ludwig von Mises

433. “What workers must learn is that the only reason why wage rates are higher in the United States is that the per head quota of capital invested is higher.”

— Ludwig von Mises

434. “No better is the propensity, very popular nowadays, to brand supporters of other ideologies as lunatics. Psychiatrists.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

436. “Every step which leads from capitalism toward planning is necessarily a step nearer to absolutism and dictatorship.”

— Ludwig von Mises

437. “Hence, the statement that the cost of living is different in different localities only means that the same individual cannot secure the same degree of satisfaction from the same stock of goods in different places.”

— Ludwig von Mises

438. “To defeat the aggressors is not enough to make peace durable. The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war.”

— Ludwig von Mises

439. “Is still fulfilling its social function in supplying the consumers with more, better and cheaper goods.”

— Ludwig von Mises

440. “When a country has substituted credit money or fiat money for metallic money, because the legal equating of the over-issued paper and the metallic money sets in motion the mechanism described by Gresham’s Law, it is often asserted that the balance of payments determines the rate of exchange. But this also is a quite inadequate explanation. The rate of exchange is determined by the purchasing power possessed by a unit of each kind of money.”

— Ludwig von Mises

441. “Inflation made it possible to divert the fury of the people to ‘speculators’ and ‘profiteers’. Thus it proved itself an excellent psychological resource of the destructive and annihilist war policy.”

— Ludwig von Mises

442. “The school is a political prize of the highest importance. It cannot be deprived of its political character as long as it remains a public and compulsory institution.”

— Ludwig von Mises

443. “Action based on reason, action therefore which is only to be understood by reason, knows only one end, the greatest pleasure of the acting individual.”

— Ludwig von Mises

444. “But even a victory of planning will not mean the end of history. Atrocious wars among the candidates for the supreme office will break out. Totalitarianism may wipe out civilization, even the whole of the human race. Then, of course, history will have come to its end too.”

— Ludwig von Mises

445. “It is impossible to describe any human action if one does not refer to the meaning the actor sees in the stimulus as well as in the end his response is aiming at.”

— Ludwig von Mises

446. “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

447. “All present-day governments are fanatically committed to an easy money policy.”

— Ludwig von Mises

448. “No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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449. “There is joint action, but no joint thinking. There is only tradition which preserves thoughts and communicates them to others as a stimulus to their thinking.”

— Ludwig von Mises

450. “The agents of etatism have certainly not been lacking in zeal and energy. But, for all this, economic affairs cannot be kept going by magistrates and policemen.”

— Ludwig von Mises