Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer.
-- Ludwig von Mises
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.
-- Ludwig von Mises
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.
-- Ludwig von Mises
The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty.
-- Ludwig von Mises
The philosophy called individualism is a philosophy of social cooperation and the progressive intensification of the social nexus.
-- Ludwig von Mises
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.
-- Ludwig von Mises
If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.
-- Ludwig von Mises
No wonder that all who have had something new to offer humanity have had nothing good to say of the state or its laws.
-- Ludwig von Mises
This, then, is freedom in the external life of man
-- Ludwig von Mises
. . . [A]s soon as we surrender the principle that the state should not interfere in any questions touching on the individual's mode of life, we end by regulating and restricting the latter down to the smallest detail.
-- Ludwig von Mises
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.
-- Ludwig von Mises
He who disdains the fall in infant mortality and the gradual disappearance of famines and plagues may cast the first stone upon the materialism of the economists.
-- Ludwig von Mises
Every specific tax, as well as the nation's whole tax system, becomes self-defeating above a certain height of the rates.
-- Ludwig von Mises
Profits are the driving force of the market economy. The greater the profits, the better the needs of the consumers are supplied.
-- Ludwig von Mises
Government is the only institution that can take a perfectly good piece of paper, print some noble words on it, and make it perfectly worthless.
-- Ludwig von Mises
Scientific criticism has no nobler task than to shatter false beliefs.
-- Ludwig von Mises
Science does not give us absolute and final certainty. It only gives us assurance within the limits of our mental abilities and the prevailing state of scientific thought.
-- Ludwig von Mises
There is in the universe something for the description and analysis of which the natural sciences cannot contribute anything. There are events beyond the range of those events that the procedures of the natural sciences are fit to observe and describe. There is human action.
-- Ludwig von Mises
The methods of the natural sciences cannot be applied to human behavior because this behavior...lacks the peculiarity that characterizes events in the field of the natural sciences, viz., regularity.
-- Ludwig von Mises
Scientific research sooner or later, but inevitably, encounters something ultimately given that it cannot trace back to something else of which it would appear as the regular or necessary derivative. Scientific progress consists in pushing further back this ultimately given.
-- Ludwig von Mises
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.
-- Ludwig von Mises
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.
-- Ludwig von Mises
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.
-- Ludwig von Mises
Reason's biological function is to preserve and promote life and to postpone its extinction as long as possible. Thinking and acting are not contrary to nature; they are, rather, the foremost features of man's nature. The most appropriate description of man as differentiated from nonhuman beings is: a being purposively struggling against the forces adverse to his life.
-- Ludwig von Mises
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.
-- Ludwig von Mises
The criterion of truth is that it works even if nobody is prepared to acknowledge it.
-- Ludwig von Mises
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.
-- Ludwig von Mises
As the science of economics...exploded the fallacies of every brand of utopianism, it was outlawed and stigmatized as unscientific.
-- Ludwig von Mises
It is not conclusive proof of a doctrine's correctness that its adversaries use the police, the hangman, and violent mobs to fight it. But it is a proof of the fact that those taking recourse to violent oppression are in their subconsciousness convinced of the untenability of their own doctrines.
-- Ludwig von Mises
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 history of the West, from the age of the Greek polis down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders.
-- Ludwig von Mises
The first condition for the establishment of perpetual peace is the general adoption of the principles of laissez-faire capitalism.
-- Ludwig von Mises
The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty.
-- Ludwig von Mises
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.
-- Ludwig von Mises
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.
-- Ludwig von Mises
The first thing a genius needs is to breath free air.
-- Ludwig von Mises
The aim of all struggles for liberty is to keep in bounds the armed defenders of peace, the governors and their constables. The political concept of the individual's freedom means: freedom from arbitrary action on the part of the police power.
-- Ludwig von Mises
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. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict.
-- Ludwig von Mises
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.
-- Ludwig von Mises
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.
-- Ludwig von Mises
Business is a means- the only means- to increase the quantity of goods available for preserving life and rendering it more agreeable.
-- Ludwig von Mises
The essence of democracy is not that everyone makes and administers laws but that lawgivers and rulers should be dependent on the people's will in such a way that they may be peaceably changed if conflict occurs.
-- Ludwig von Mises
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...
-- Ludwig von Mises
The rich adopt novelties and become accustomed to their use. This sets a fashion which others imitate. Once the richer classes have adopted a certain way of living, producers have an incentive to improve the methods of manufacture so that soon it is possible for the poorer classes to follow suit. Thus luxury furthers progress. Innovation is the whim of an elite before it becomes a need of the public. The luxury today is the necessity of tomorrow. Luxury is the roadmaker of progress: it develops latent needs and makes people discontented. In so far as they think consistently, moralists who condemn luxury must recommend the comparatively desireless existence of the wild life roaming in the woods as the ultimate ideal of civilized life.
-- Ludwig von Mises
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.
-- Ludwig von Mises
...it is solely bigness in business which makes it possible to supply the masses with all those products the present-day American common man does not want to do without. Luxury goods for the few can be produced in small shops. Luxury goods for the many require big business.
-- Ludwig von Mises
For the sake of domestic peace, liberalism aims at democratic government. Democracy is therefore not a revolutionary institution. On the contrary it is the very means of preventing revolution and civil wars. It provides a method for the peaceful adjustment of government to the will of the majority.
-- Ludwig von Mises
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.
-- Ludwig von Mises
Reason is the main resource of man in his struggle for survival.
-- Ludwig von Mises
If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.
-- Ludwig von Mises
The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.
-- Ludwig von Mises
What pays under capitalism is satisfying the common man, the customer. The more people you satisfy, the better for you.
-- Ludwig von Mises
The uncouth hordes of common men are not fit to recognize duly the merits of those who eclipse their own wretchedness.
-- Ludwig von Mises
There is in the universe something for the description and analysis of which the natural sciences cannot contribute anything. There are events beyond the range of those events that the procedures of the natural sciences are fit to observe and describe. There is human action.
-- Ludwig von Mises
A nation's policy form an integral whole. Foreign policy and domestic policy are closely linked together; they are but one system; they condition each other.
-- Ludwig von Mises
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.
-- Ludwig von Mises
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