Ludwig von Mises Quotations | Page 5

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.

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

In life everything is continually in flux.

There is no kind of freedom and liberty other than the kind which the market economy brings about.

One has to recognize that science is not metaphysics, and certainly not mysticism; it can never bring us the illumination and the satisfaction experienced by one enraptured in ecstasy. Science is sobriety and clarity of conception, not intoxicated vision.

No one can escape the influence of a prevailing ideology.

The first socialists were the intellectuals; they, and not the masses, are the backbone of Socialism.

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

My theories explain, but cannot slow the decline of a great civilization. I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline.

Credit expansion can bring about a temporary boom. But such a fictitious prosperity must end in a general depression of trade, a slump.

A nation, therefore, has no right to say to a province: You belong to me, I want to take you. A province consists of its inhabitants. If anybody has a right to be heard in this case it is these inhabitants. Boundary disputes should be settled by plebiscite.

What people today call inflation is not inflation, i.e., the increase in the quantity of money and money substitutes, but the general rise in commodity prices and wage rates which is the inevitable consequence of inflation.

Changes in human conditions are brought about by the pioneering of the cleverest and most energetic men. They take the lead and the rest of mankind follows them little by little.

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.

Those who satisfy the wants of a smaller number of people only collect fewer votes-dollars-than those who satisfy the wants of more people.

No matter how efficient school training may be, it would only produce stagnation, orthodoxy, and rigid pedantry if there were no uncommon men pushing forward beyond the wisdom of their tutors.

It is not enough for [the investor] to know all the factors that can possibly contribute to the determination of a future event. In order to anticipate correctly they must also anticipate correctly the quantity as it were of each factor's contribution and the instant at which its contribution will become effective.

There is no reason why capitalists and entrepreneurs should be ashamed of earning profits.

No architect is held responsible for the behavior of those who inhabit the structure he designed.

Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought.

The market system makes all producers responsible to the consumer.

Many pioneers of these industrial changes, it is true, became rich. But they acquired their wealth by supplying the public with motor cars, airplanes, radio sets, refrigerators, moving and talking pictures, and variety of less spectacular but no less useful innovations. These new products were certainly not an achievement of offices and bureaucrats.

Every innovation makes its appearance as a 'luxury' of the few well-to-do. After industry has become aware of it, the luxury then becomes a 'necessity' for all.

The market is a democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote.

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.

The better an entrepreneur succeeds, the more is he vilified and themore is he soaked by taxation.

Facts per se can neither prove nor refute anything. Everything is decided by the interpretation and explanation of the facts, by the ideas and the theories.

The sharper the competition, the better it serves its social function to improve economic production.

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

Government and state can never be perfect because they owe their raison d'être to the imperfection of man and can attain their end, the elimination of man's innate impulse to violence, only by recourse to violence, the very thing they are called upon to prevent.

We owe the origin and development of human society and, consequently, of culture and civilization, to the fact that work performed under the division of labor is more productive than when performed in isolation.

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.

There is no use in deceiving ourselves. American public opinion rejects the market economy, the capitalistic free enterprise system that provided the nation with the highest standard of living ever attained. Full government control of all activities of the individual is virtually the goal of both national parties.

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.

Those politicians, professors and union bosses who curse big business are fighting for a lower standard of living.

The continued existence of society depends upon private property.

The final outcome of the credit expansion is general impoverishment.

What economic calculation requires is a monetary system whose functioning is not sabotaged by government interference.

The situation of having to belong to a state to which one does not wish is no less onerous if it is the result of an election than if one must endure it as the consequence of a military conquest.

Credit expansion is the governments' foremost tool in their struggle against the market economy. In their hands it is the magic wand designed to conjure away the scarcity of capital goods, to lower the rate of interest or to abolish it altogether, to finance lavish government spending, to expropriate the capitalists, to contrive everlasting booms, and to make everybody prosperous.

Civilization is a work of peaceful co-operation.

The real bosses, in the capitalist system of market economy, are the consumers.

Governments, political parties, pressure groups, and the bureaucrats of the educational hierarchy think they can avoid the inevitable consequences of unsuitable measures by boycotting and silencing the independent economists. But truth persists and works, even if nobody is left to utter it.

It is impossible to understand the history of economic thought if one does not pay attention to the fact that economics as such is a challenge to the conceit of those in power.

State interference in economic life, which calls itself economic policy, has done nothing but destroy economic life. Prohibitions and regulations have by their general obstructive tendency fostered the growth of the spirit of wastefulness.

Mankind does not drink alcohol because there are breweries, distilleries, and vineyards; men brew beer, distill spirits, and grow grapes because of the demand for alcoholic drinks.

If the members of parliament no longer consider themselves mandatories of the taxpayers but deputies of those receiving salaries, wages, subsidies, doles, and other benefits from the treasury, democracy is done for.

Economics must not be relegated to classrooms and statistical offices and must not be left to esoteric circles. It is the philosophy of human life and action and concerns everybody and everything. It is the pith of civilization and of man's human existence.

War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings...but no one has for those reasons yet sought to celebrate earthquakes and cholera as stimulators of the productive forces in the general interest.

The only source from which an entrepreneurs profits stem is his ability to anticipate better than other people the future demand of the consumers.

Nobody can be at the same time a correct bureaucrat and an innovator

The egalitarian doctrine is manifestly contrary to all the facts established by biology and by history. Only fanatical partisans of this theory can contend that what distinguishes the genius from the dullard is entirely the effect of postnatal influences.

You call it a 'loophole' when the government still allows you some freedom.

where Nietzsche's response to the equation of socialism and morality was to question the value of morality, at least as it had been customarily understood, economists like Mises and Hayek pursued a different path, one Nietzsche would never have dared to take: they made the market the very expression of morality.

Resentment is at work when one so hates somebody for his more favorable circumstances that one is prepared to bear heavy losses if only the hated one might also come to harm. Many of those who attack capitalism know very well that their situation under any other economic system will be less favorable.

Under capitalism everybody is the architect of his own fortune.

Man is not, like the animals, an obsequious puppet of instincts and sensual impulses. Man has the power to suppress instinctive desires, he has a will of his own, he chooses between incompatible ends.

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

Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life that can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends.

The worst law is better than bureaucratic tyranny.

It is extremely difficult for our contemporaries to conceive of the conditions of free banking because they take government interference with banking for granted and as necessary.

He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.

The program of classical liberalism, condensed into a single word, would have to read: property.

Do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it.

Spontaneous actions of individuals, aiming at nothing else than at the improvement of their own state of satisfaction, undermined the prestige of the coercive status system step by step.

Continued inflation inevitably leads to catastrophe.

In the capitalist society there is a place and bread for all. Its ability to expand provides sustenance for every worker. Permanent unemployment is not a feature of free capitalism.

Capitalism gave the world what it needed, a higher standard of living for a steadily increasing number of people.

Those fighting for free enterprise and free competition do not defend the interests of those rich today. They want a free hand left to unknown men who will be the entrepreneurs of tomorrow...

The foundation of any and every civilization, including our own, is private ownership of the means of production. Whoever wishes to criticize modern civilization, therefore, begins with private property.

The capitalistic social order, therefore, is an economic democracy in the strictest sense of the word. In the last analysis, all decisions are dependent on the will of the people as consumers. Thus, whenever there is a conflict between the consumers' views and those of the business managers, market pressures assure that the views of the consumers win out eventually.

It is inherent in the nature of the capitalistic economy that, in the final analysis, the employment of the factors of production is aimed only toward serving the wishes of consumers.

No very deep knowledge of economics is usually needed for grasping the immediate effects of a measure; but the task of economics is to foretell the remoter effects, and so to allow us to avoid such acts as attempt to remedy a present ill by sowing the seeds of a much greater ill for the future.

Profits are the driving force of the market economy. The greater the profits, the better the needs of the consumers are supplied... He who serves the public best, makes the highest profits.

Many who are self-taught far excel the doctors, masters, and bachelors of the most renowned universities.

All people, however fanatical they may be in their zeal to disparage and to fight capitalism, implicitly pay homage to it by passionately clamoring for the products it turns out

Most of us have no sympathy with the rich idler who spends his life in pleasure without ever doing any work. But even he fulfills a function in the life of the social organism. He sets an example of luxury that awakens in the multitude a consciousness of new needs and gives industry the incentive to fulfill them.

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

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.

Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping toward destruction. Therefore, everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interest of everyone hangs on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us.

The market economy is the social system of the division of labor under private ownership of the means of production. Everybody acts on his own behalf; but everybodys actions aim at the satisfaction of other peoples needs as well as at the satisfaction of his own. Everybody in acting serves his fellow citizens.

The body of economic knowledge is an essential element in the structure of human civilization; it is the foundation upon which modern industrialism and all the moral, intellectual, technological, and therapeutical achievements of the last centuries have been built.

The market is not a place, a thing, or a collective entity. It is a process.

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.

The democracy of the market consists in the fact that people themselves make their choices and that no dictator has the power to force them to submit to his value judgments.

The meaning of economic freedom is this: that the individual is in a position to choose the way in which he wants to integrate himself into the totality of society.

[T]he essence of so-called war prosperity: it enriches some by what it takes from others. It is not rising wealth but a shifting of wealth and income.

Nothing, however, is as ill founded as the assertion of the alleged equality of all members of the human race.

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

Liberalism and capitalism address themselves to the cool, well-balanced mind. They proceed by strict logic, eliminating any appeal to the emotions. Socialism, on the contrary, works on the emotions, tries to violate logical considerations by rousing a sense of personal interest and to stifle the voice of reason by awakening primitive instincts.

There is simply no other choice than this: either to abstain from interference in the free play of the market, or to delegate the entire management of production and distribution to the government. Either capitalism or socialism: there exists no middle way.

What pushes the masses into the camp of socialism is, even more than the illusion that socialism will make them richer, the expectation that it will curb all those who are better than they themselves are.

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.

History has witnessed the failure of many endeavors to impose peace by war, cooperation by coercion, unanimity by slaughtering dissidents.... A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets.

In the bureaucratic machine of socialism the way toward promotion is not achievement but the favor of the superiors.

Tyranny is the political corollary of socialism, as representative government is the political corollary of the market economy.

The gold standard did not collapse. Governments abolished it in order to pave the way for inflation. The whole grim apparatus of oppression and coercion, policemen, customs guards, penal courts, prisons, in some countries even executioners, had to be put into action in order to destroy the gold standard.

The desire for an increase of wealth can be satisfied through exchange, which is the only method possible in a capitalist economy, or by violence and petition as in a militarist society, where the strong acquire by force, the weak by petitioning.

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.

Inflationism, however, is not an isolated phenomenon. It is only one piece in the total framework of politico-economic and socio-philosophical ideas of our time. Just as the sound money policy of gold standard advocates went hand in hand with liberalism, free trade, capitalism and peace, so is inflationism part and parcel of imperialism, militarism, protectionism, statism and socialism.