Ludwig von Mises Quotations

The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments.

Economically considered, war and revolution are always bad business.

Modern society, based as it is on the division of labor, can be preserved only under conditions of lasting peace.

The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.

Men are fighting... because they are convinced that the extermination of adversaries is the only means of promoting their own well-being.

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

Only one thing can conquer war - that attitude of mind which can see nothing in war but destruction and annihilation.

If men do not now succeed in abolishing war, civilization and mankind are doomed.

A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets.

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

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

War can really cause no economic boom, at least not directly, since an increase in wealth never does result from destruction of goods.

Innovation is the whim of an elite before it becomes a need of the public.

The philosophy of protectionism is a philosophy of war.

If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.

War... is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror.

Manufacturing and commercial monopolies owe their origin not to a tendency imminent in a capitalist economy but to governmental interventionist policy directed against free trade and laissez faire.

The attainment of the economic aims of man presupposes peace.

Whoever wants peace among nations must seek to limit the state and its influence most strictly.

The root of the evil is not the construction of new, more dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest.

Whoever wishes peace among peoples must fight statism.

If some peoples pretend that history or geography gives them the right to subjugate other races, nations, or peoples, there can be no peace.

Human civilization is not something achieved against nature; it is rather the outcome of the working of the innate qualities of man.

Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things.

War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.

Wars of aggression are popular nowadays with those nations convinced that only victory and conquest could improve their material well-being.

Peace and not war is the father of all things.

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

There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.

The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty.

The consumers are merciless. They never buy in order to benefit a less efficient producer and to protect him against the consequences of his failure to manage better. They want to be served as well as possible. And the working of the capitalist system forces the entrepreneur to obey the orders issued by the consumers.

It is not the fault of the entrepreneurs that the consumers,the people, the common man,prefer liquor to Bibles and detective stories to serious books, and that governments prefer guns to butter. The entrepreneur does not make greater profits in selling bad things than in selling good things. His profits are the greater the better he succeeds in providing the consumers with those things they ask for most intensely.

The real bosses in the capitalist system of market economy are the consumers. They by their buying and by their abstention from buying decide who should own the capital and run the plants. They determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality. Their attitudes result either in profit or in loss for the enterpriser. They make poor men rich and rich men poor. They are no easy bosses.

People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests.

The common man is the sovereign consumer whose buying or abstention from buying ultimately determines what should be produced and in what quantity and quality.

Without calculation, economic activity is impossible. Since under Socialism economic calculation is impossible, under Socialism there can be no economic activity in our sense of the word All economic change, therefore, would involve operations the value of which could neither be predicted beforehand nor ascertained after they had taken place. Everything would be a leap in the dark. Socialism is the renunciation of rational economy.

So far as Feminism seeks to adjust the legal position of woman to that of man, so far as it seeks to offer her legal and economic freedom to develop and act in accordance with her inclinations, desires, and economic circumstances—so far it is nothing more than a branch of the great liberal movement, which advocates peaceful and free evolution.

It is merely a metaphor to call competition competitive war, or simply, war. The function of battle is destruction; of competition, construction.

Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.

The flowering of human society depends on two factors: the intellectual power of outstanding men to conceive sound social and economic theories, and the ability of these or other men to make these ideologies palatable to the majority.

Capital does not 'beget profit' as Marx thought. The capital goods as such are dead things that in themselves do not accomplish anything. If they are utilized according to a good idea, profit results. If they are utilized according to a mistaken idea, no profit or losses result. It is the entrepreneurial decision that creates either profit or loss.

Liberty is meaningless if it is only the liberty to agree with those in power.

The philosophy underlying the system of progressive taxation is that the income and wealth of the well-to-do classes can be freely tapped. What the advocates of these tax rates fail to realize is that the greater part of the incomes taxed away would not have been consumed but saved and invested.

Only to bureaucrats can the idea occur that establishing new offices, promulgating new decrees, and increasing the number of government employees alone can be described as positive and beneficial measures.

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.

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.

Society is joint action and cooperation in which each participant sees the other partner's success as a means for the attainment of his own.

The entrepreneur profits to the extent he has succeeded in serving the consumers better than other people have done.

The fundamental law of the market is: the customer is always right.

The whole of mankind's progress has had to be achieved against the resistance and opposition of the state and its power of coercion.

Public works are not accomplished by the miraculous power of a magic wand. They are paid for by funds taken away from the citizens.

All varieties of interference with the market phenomena not only fail to achieve the ends aimed at by their authors and supporters, but bring about a state of affairs which - from the point of view of their authors and advocates valuations - is less desirable than the previous state of affairs which they were designed to alter.

Some think that they will exercise power for the general good, but that is what all those with power have believed. Power is evil in itself, regardless of who exercises it.

If the government objects to monopoly prices for new inventions, it should stop granting patents.

True, governments can reduce the rate of interest in the short run. They can issue additional paper money. They can open the way to credit expansion by the banks. They can thus create an artificial boom and the appearance of prosperity. But such a boom is bound to collapse soon or late and to bring about a depression.

The planner is a potential dictator who wants to deprive all other people of the power to plan and act according to their own plans. He aims at one thing only: the exclusive absolute preeminence of his own plan.

The idea that political freedom can be preserved in the absence of economic freedom, and vice versa, is an illusion. Political freedom is the corollary of economic freedom.

Taxing profits is tantamount to taxing success.

A new type of superstition has got hold of people's minds, the worship of the state. People demand the exercise of the methods of coercion and compulsion, of violence and threat. Woe to anybody who does not bend his knee to the fashionable idols!

The masses, in their capacity as consumers, ultimately determine everybody's revenues and wealth.

The so-called liberals of today have the very popular idea that freedom of speech, of thought, of the press, freedom of religion, freedom from imprisonment without trial-that all these freedoms can be preserved in the absence of what is called economic freedom. They do not realize that, in a system where there is no market, where the government directs everything, all those other freedoms are illusory, even if they are made into laws and written up in constitutions.

German Marxian's coined the dictum: If socialism is against human nature, then human nature must be changed.

The market economy needs no apologists and propagandists. It can apply to itself the words of Sir Christopher Wren's epitaph in St. Paul's: 'If you seek his monument, look around.'

If the practice persists of covering government deficits with the issue of notes, then the day will come without fail, sooner or later, when the monetary systems of those nations pursuing this course will break down completely. The purchasing power of the monetary unit will decline more and more, until finally it disappears completely.

War is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror. Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things. Only economic action has created the wealth around us; labor, not the profession of arms, brings happiness. Peace builds, war destroys.

Only stilted pedants can conceive the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful and what is not. They try to derive from the works of the past a code of rules with which, as they fancy, the writers and artists of the future should comply. But the genius does not cooperate with the pundit.

Welfare policies never attain those - allegedly beneficial - ends which the government and the self-styled progressives who advocated them wanted to attain, but - on the contrary - bring about a state of affairs which - from the very point of view of the government and its supporters - is even more unsatisfactory than the previous state of affairs they wanted to 'improve.'

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

Capitalism and socialism are two distinct patterns of social organization. Private control of the means of production and public control are contradictory notions and not merely contrary notions. There is no such thing as a mixed economy, a system that would stand midway between capitalism and socialism.

This is the difference between slavery and freedom. The slave must do what his superior orders him to do, but the free citizen-and this is what freedom means-is in a position to choose his own way of life.

Depressions and mass unemployment are not caused by the free market but by government interference in the economy.

To the grumbler who complains about the unfairness of the market system only one piece of advice can be given: If you want to acquire wealth, then try to satisfy the public by offering them something that is cheaper or which they like better....Equality under the law gives you the power to challenge every millionaire.

Capitalism needs neither propaganda nor apostles. Its achievements speak for themselves. Capitalism delivers the goods.

The worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men. The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by governments.

Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them.

It is vain to fight totalitarianism by adopting totalitarian methods. Freedom can only be won by men unconditionally committed to the principles of freedom. The first requisite for a better social order is the return to unrestricted freedom of thought and speech.

Laissez faire does not mean: let soulless mechanical forces operate. It means: let individuals choose how they want to cooperate in the social division of labor and let them determine what the entrepreneurs should produce.

Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer.

The boom produces impoverishment. But still more disastrous are its moral ravages. It makes people despondent and dispirited. The more optimistic they were under the illusory prosperity of the boom, the greater is their despair and their feeling of frustration.

[E]conomic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics

The idea of Socialism is at once grandiose and simple. . .We may say, in fact, that it is one of the most ambitious creations of the human spirit, . . .so magnificent, so daring, that it has rightly aroused the greatest admiration. If we wish to save the world from barbarism we have to refute Socialism, but we cannot thrust it carelessly aside.

The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau.

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.

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

In capitalist enterprise there is no secure income and no security of wealth.

The wealth of the well-to-do of an industrial society is both the cause and effect of the masses' well-being.

The policies advocated by the welfare school remove the incentive to saving on the part of private citizens.

All almsgiving inevitably tends to pauperize the recipient.

In the market economy the worker sells his services as other people sell their commodities. The employer is not the employee's lord. He is simply the buyer of services which he must purchase at their market price.

The interventionist policy (big government) provides thousands and thousands of people with safe, placid, and not too strenuous jobs at the expense of the rest of society.

Western civilization is based upon the libertarian principle, and all its achievements are the results of the action of free men.

Assistance granted to the unemployed does not dispose of unemployment. It makes it easier for the unemployed to remain idle.

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.

The elimination of profit, whatever methods may be resorted to for its execution, must transform society into a senseless jumble. It would create poverty for all.

A higher standard of living also brings about a higher standard of culture and civilization.

Every restriction of trade creates vested interests that are from then on opposed to its removal.

It is untrue that some are poor because others are rich. If an order of society in which incomes were equal replaced the capitalist order, everyone would become poorer.

Every socialist is a disguised dictator.

Everything brought forward in favor of Socialism during the last hundred years, in thousands of writings and speeches, all the blood which has been spilt by the supporters of Socialism, cannot make socialism workable.

Socialism is the renunciation of rational economy.