Ludwig Von Mises Quotes

The advocates of public control cannot do without inflation. They need it in order to finance their policy of reckless spending and of lavishly subsidizing and bribing the voters.

Almost all the fathers of socialism were members of the upper middle class or of the professions.

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.

The masses do not like those who surpass them in any regard. The average man envies and hates those who are different.

Rulers do not like to admit that their power is restricted by any laws other than those of physics and biology. They never ascribe their failures and frustrations to the violation of economic law.

Democracy is not a good that people can enjoy without trouble. It is, on the contrary, a treasure that must be daily defended and conquered anew by strenuous effort.

The continued existence of society depends upon private property.

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

There cannot be stable money within an environment dominated by ideologies hostile to the preservation of economic freedom.

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

The worst law is better than bureaucratic tyranny.

Interventionism cannot be considered as an economic system destined to stay. It is a method for the transformation of capitalism into socialism by a series of successive steps.

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

What those people who ask for equality have in mind is always an increase in their own power to consume.

Keynes did not teach us how to perform the miracle of turning a stone into bread, but the not at all miraculous procedure of eating the seed corn.

Plato and Hitler were both the same kind of consistent socialists who planned also for the production of future socialists, the breeding and education of future members of society.

The market is not a place, a thing, or a collective entity. The market is a process, actuated by the interplay of the actions of the various individuals cooperating under the division of labor.

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.

Without speculation there can be no economic activity reaching beyond the immediate present.

Human action is purposeful behavior.

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

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

There can be no freedom in art and literature where the government determines who shall create them.

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.

Daily experience proves clearly to everybody but the most bigoted fanatics of socialism that governmental management is inefficient and wasteful.

A new type of superstition has got hold of people's minds, the worship of the state.

The aim of the popularization of economic studies is not to make every man an economist. The idea is to equip the citizen for his civic functions in community life.

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

In many fields of the administration of interventionist measures, favoritism simply cannot be avoided.

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

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

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

Economically considered, war and revolution are always bad business.

Peace and not war is the father of all things.

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

Inflation is the fiscal complement of statism and arbitrary government. It is a cog in the complex of policies and institutions which gradually lead toward totalitarianism .

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.

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.

The middle-of-the-road policy is not an economic system that can last. It is a method for the realization of socialism by installments.

The characteristic feature of a free society is that it can function in spite of the fact that its members disagree in many judgments of value. Freedom really means the freedom to make mistakes.

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.

All those evils which the [liberals] interpret as evidence of the failure of capitalism, are the necessary outcome of interference with the market.

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.

The market and its inescapable law are supreme.

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

Socialism is the renunciation of rational economy.

The first thing a genius needs is to breath free air.

The government and its chiefs do not have the powers of the mythical Santa Claus. They cannot spend except by taking out of the pockets of some people for the benefit of others.

Planning other people's actions means to prevent them from planning for themselves, means to deprive them of their essentially human quality, means enslaving them.

Government is an apparatus of compulsion and coercion.