Top 500 Ludwig von Mises Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

409. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

417. “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

418. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

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. “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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428. “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

429. “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

430. “The people who think that the power of big business is enormous are mistaken.”

— Ludwig von Mises

431. “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

432. “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

433. “Capitalism has succeeded in raising the material well-being of the masses in an unprecedented way. In the capitalist countries population figures are now several times higher than they were at the eve of the “industrial revolution,” and every citizen of these nations enjoys a standard of living much higher than that of the well-to-do of earlier ages.”

— Ludwig von Mises

434. “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

435. “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

436. “Rhetorical bombast, music and song resound, banners wave, flowers and colors serve as symbols, and the leaders seek to attach their followers to their own person. Liberalism has nothing to do with all this. It has no party flower and no party color, no party song and no party idols, no symbols and no slogans. It has the substance and the arguments. These must lead it to victory.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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

— Ludwig von Mises

438. “Those who disagree with the dictator’s plan have no other means to carry on than to defeat the despot by force of arms.”

— Ludwig von Mises

439. “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

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

— Ludwig von Mises

441. “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

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. “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

445. “An intellectual inferiority of the masses would manifest itself most evidently in their aiming at the abolition of the system in which they themselves are supreme and are served by the elite of the most talented men.”

— 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. “The main achievement of economics is that it has provided a theory of peaceful human cooperation. This is why the harbingers of violent conflict have branded it as a dismal science and why this age of wars, civil wars, and destruction has no use for it.”

— Ludwig von Mises

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. “What vitiates entirely the socialists economic critique of capitalism is their failure to grasp the sovereignty of the consumers in the market economy.”

— Ludwig von Mises