Best quotes by Ludwig von Mises

An entrepreneur cannot be trained. A man becomes and entrepreneur by seizing an opportunity and filling the gap. No special education is required for such a display of keen judgment, foresight, and energy.

Every government intervention [in the marketplace] creates unintended consequences, which lead to calls for further government interventions.

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.

Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.

Freedom really means the freedom to make mistakes.

The criterion of truth is that it works even if nobody is prepared to acknowledge it.

Economics is not about things and tangible material objects; it is about men, their meanings and actions.

If you increase the quantity of money, you bring about the lowering of the purchasing power of the monetary unit.

The truth is that the government cannot give if it does not take from somebody...It is not in the power of the government to make everybody more prosperous.

Taxing profits is tantamount to taxing success.

What mankind needs today is liberation from the rule of nonsensical slogans and a return to sound reasoning.

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

In a battle between force and an idea, the latter always prevails.

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.

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.

A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.

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.

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

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

Freedom is indivisible. As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop.

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.

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

It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.

The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution.

If one rejects laissez faire on account of mans fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action.

He who serves the public best, makes the highest profits.

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

Under capitalism everybody is the architect of his own fortune.

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

The truth is that most people lack the intellectual ability and courage to resist a popular movement, however pernicious and ill-considered.

The causes of all panics, crashes and depressions can be summed up in only four words: the misuse of credit.

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

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

The main propoganda trick of supporters of the allegedly "progressive" policy of government control is to blame capitalism for all that is unsatisfactory in present-day conditions and to extol the blessings of socialism. They have never attempted to prove their fallacious dogmas, all they did was to call their adversaries names and cast suspicion upon their motives. And, unfortunately, the average citizen cannot see through these stratagems. The liars must be afraid of the truth and are therefore driven to suppress its pronouncement.

Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build, it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created.

Liberty is always freedom from the government.

The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion.

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.

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

Government is the only institution that can take a valuable commodity like paper, and make it worthless by applying ink.

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.

Every socialist is a disguised dictator.

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.

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

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.