Best quotes by Ludwig von Mises

Do the American voters know that the unprecedented improvement in their standard of living that the last hundred years brought was the result of the steady rise in the per-head quota of capital invested? Do they realize that every measure leading to capital decumulation jeopardizes their prosperity?

It is labor alone that is productive: it creates wealth and therewith lays the outward foundations for the inward flowering of man.

The direction of all economic affairs is in the market society a task of the entrepreneurs. Theirs is the control of production. They are at the helm and steer the ship. A superficial observer would believe that they are supreme. But they are not. They are bound to obey unconditionally the captain's orders.

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

The genuine history of mankind is the history of ideas. It is ideas that distinguish man from all other beings. Ideas engender social institutions, political changes, technologi- cal methods of production, and all that is called economic conditions.

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 prerequisite for more economic equality in the world is industrialization. And this is possible only through increased capital investment, increased capital accumulation.

Economic theory has demonstrated in an irrefutable way that a prosperity created by an expansionist monetary and credit policy is illusory and must end in a slump, an economic crisis.

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.

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

The market economy as such does not respect political frontiers. Its field is the world.

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.

All almsgiving inevitably tends to pauperize the recipient.

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

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

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

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.

The average American worker enjoys amenities for which Croesus, Crassus, the Medici, and Louis XIV would have envied him.

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.

Value is not intrinsic, it is not in things. It is within us; it is the way in which man reacts to the conditions of his environment. Neither is value in words and doctrines, it is reflected in human conduct. It is not what a man or groups of men say about value that counts, but how they act.

Anarchism misunderstands the real nature of man. It would be practicable only in a world of angels and saints

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.

He who accepts life for what it is and never allows himself to be overwhelmed by it does not need to seek refuge for his crushed self-confidence in the solace of a 'saving lie'. If the longed-for success is not forthcoming, if the vicissitudes of fate destroy in the twinkling of an eye what had to be painstakingly built up by years of hard work, then he simply multiplies his exertions. He can look disaster in the eye without despairing.

Big business depends entirely on the patronage of those who buy its products: the biggest enterprises loses its power and its influence when it loses its customers.

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.

People must learn that the accumulation of wealth by the successful conduct of business is the corollary of the improvement of their own standard of living and vice versa. They must realize that bigness in business is not an evil, but both the cause and effect of the fact that they themselves enjoy all those amenities whose enjoyment is called the “American way of life.

The governments alone are responsible for the spread of the superstitious awe with which the common man looks upon every bit of paper upon which the treasury or agencies which it controls have printed the magical words legal tender.

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.

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

If people do not consume their whole incomes, the non-consumed surplus can be invested, it increases the amount of capital goods available and thereby makes it possible to embark upon projects which could not be executed before.

An essential point in the social philosophy of interventionism is the existence of an inexhaustible fund which can be squeezed forever. The whole system of interventionism collapses when the fountain is drained off: The Santa Clause principle liquidates itself.

Every extension of the functions and power of the State beyond its primary duty of maintaining peace and justice should be scrutinized with jealous vigilance.

Capital is not a free gift of God or of nature. It is the outcome of a provident restriction of consumption on the part of man. It is created and increased by saving and maintained by the abstention from dissaving.

Two hundred years ago, before the advent of capitalism, a man's social status was fixed from the beginning to the end of his life; he inherited it from his ancestors and it never changed.

Our whole civilization rests on the fact that men have always succeeded in beating off the attack of the re-distributors.

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.

Inflation is the true opium of the people and it is administered to them by anticapitalist governments and parties.

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

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

Neither the entrepreneurs nor the farmers nor the capitalists determine what has to be produced. The consumers do that.

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

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.

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

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.

Government is an apparatus of compulsion and coercion.

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.

Free markets. What does this system mean? The answer is simple: it is the market economy, it is the system in which the cooperation of individuals in the social division of labor is achieved by the market.

A free press can only exist where there is private control over the means of production

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.

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

History can tell us what happened in the past. But it cannot assert that it must happen again in the future.

In talking about equality and asking vehemently for its realization, nobody advocates a curtailment of his own present income.

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.

Socialism is the renunciation of rational economy.

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.

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

The essence of Keynesianism is its complete failure to conceive the role that saving and capital accumulation play in the improvement of economic conditions.

Private property creates for the individual a sphere in which he is free of the state. It sets limits to the operation of the authoritarian will. It allows other forces to arise side by side with and in opposition to political power. It thus becomes the basis of all those activities that are free from violent interference on the part of the state. It is the soil in which the seeds of freedom are nurtured and in which the autonomy of the individual and ultimately all intellectual and material progress are rooted.

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.

History does not provide any example of capital accumulation brought about by a government. As far as governments invested in the construction of roads, railroads, and other useful public works, the capital needed was provided by the savings of individual citizens and borrowed by the government.

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 .

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.

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 word "Capitalism" expresses, for our age, the sum of all evil. Even the opponents of Socialism are dominated by socialist ideas.

The state is the only institution entitled to apply coercion and compulsion and to inflict harm upon individuals. This tremendous power cannot be abandoned to the discretion of some men, however competent and clever they may deem themselves. It is necessary to restrict its application. This is the task of the laws.

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

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.

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.

Spiritual movements are revolts of thought against inertia, of the few against the many; of those who because they are strong in spirit are strongest alone against those who can express themselves only in the mass and the mob, and who are significant only because they are numerous.

What makes small business develop into big business is not spending, but saving and capital accumulation.

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

What is called economic progress is the joint effect of the activities of the three progressive groups-or classes-of the savers, the scientist-inventors, and the entrepreneurs, operating in a market economy as far as it is not sabotaged by the endeavors of the nonprogressive majority of the routinists and the public policies supported by them.

The boom is called good business, prosperity, and upswing. Its unavoidable aftermath, the readjustment of conditions to the real data of the market, is called crisis, slump, bad business, depression.

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

The goal of liberalism is the peaceful cooperation of all men. It aims at peace among nations too. When there is private ownership of the means of production everywhere and when laws, the tribunals and the administration treat foreigners and citizens on equal terms, it is of little importance where a country's frontiers are drawn... War no longer pays; there is no motive for aggression... All nations can coexist peacefully.