Ludwig Von Mises Quotes
He who only wishes and hopes does not interfere actively with the course of events and with the shaping of his own destiny.
The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state.
The living is not perfect because it is liable to change; the dead is not perfect because it does not live.
The class of those who have the ability to think their own thoughts is separated by an unbridgeable gulf from the class of those who cannot.
As soon as the economic freedom which the market economy grants to its members is removed, all political liberties and bills of rights become humbug.
It is the worst of all superstitions to assume that the epistemological characteristics of one branch of knowledge must necessarily be applicable to any other branch.
If, as is generally the case, the heirs are not equal to the demands which life makes on an entrepreneur, the inherited wealth rapidly vanishes.
Society is only possible on these terms, that the individual finds therein a strengthening of his own ego and his own will.
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.
Every specific tax, as well as the nation's whole tax system, becomes self-defeating above a certain height of the rates.
No increase in the welfare of the member of society can result from the availability of an additional quantity of money.
In order to succeed in business a man does not need a degree from a school of business administration. These schools train the subalterns for routine jobs. They certainly do not train entrepreneurs.
The member of a contractual society is free because he serves others only in serving himself. What restrains him is only the inevitable natural phenomenon of scarcity.
Government means always coercion and compulsion and is by necessity the opposite of liberty.
The only means to well-being is to increase the quantity of products. This is what business aims at.
Business is a means- the only means- to increase the quantity of goods available for preserving life and rendering it more agreeable.
In all countries with a settled bureaucracy people used to say: The cabinets come and go, but the bureaus remain.
The boom squanders through malinvestment scarce factors of production and reduces the stock available through overconsumption; its alleged blessings are paid for by impoverishment.
The tow pillars of democratic government are the primacy of the law and the budget.
Inflation has always been an important resource of policies of war and revolution and why we also find it in the service of socialism.
Under the gold standard gold is money and money is gold. It is immaterial whether or not the laws assign legal tender quality only to gold coins minted by the government.
Reason and action are congeneric and homogenous, two aspects of the same phenomenon.
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.
Inflation is an increase in the quantity of money without a corresponding increase in the demand for money, i.e., for cash holdings.
What is needed for a sound expansion of production is additional capital goods, not money or fiduciary media. The credit expansion is built on the sands of banknotes and deposits. It must collapse.
The productivity of social cooperation surpasses in every respect the sum total of the production of isolated individuals.
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.'
Servile labour disappeared because it could not stand the competition of free labour; its un-profitability sealed its doom in the market economy.
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.
American authors or scientists are prone to consider the wealthy businessman as a barbarian, as a man exclusively intent upon making money.
The elimination of profit, whatever methods may be resorted to for its execution, must transform society into a senseless jumble.
The biological equipment of a man rigidly restricts the field in which he can serve.
Socialism is an alternative to capitalism as potassium cyanide is an alternative to water.
Repression by brute force is always a confession of the inability to make use of the better weapons of the intellect—better because they alone give promise of final success.
The attempt to restrain prices within limits has to be given up. A government that sets out to abolish market prices is inevitably driven towards the abolition of private property.
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.
Inflationism is that monetary policy that seeks to increase the quantity of money.
Naive inflationism demands an increase in the quantity of money without suspecting that this will diminish the purchasing power of the money.
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.