Quotes from Ludwig von Mises

To assign to everybody his proper place in society is the task of the consumers. Their buying and abstention from buying is instrumental in determining each individual's social position.

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.

The Marxians love of democratic institutions was a stratagem only, a pious fraud for the deception of the masses. Within a socialist community there is no room left for freedom.

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 continued existence of society depends upon private property.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

Society is only possible on these terms, that the individual finds therein a strengthening of his own ego and his own will.

Economic prosperity is not so much a material problem; it is, first of all, an intellectual, spiritual, and moral problem.

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

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

The alcoholic and the drug addict harm only themselves by their behavior; the person who violates the rules of morality governing mans life in society harms not only himself, but everyone.

The most serious dangers for American freedom and the American way of life do not come from without.

Taxing profits is tantamount to taxing success.

We must fight all that we dislike in public life. We must substitute better ideas for wrong ideas.

Whoever wishes peace among peoples must fight statism.

In life everything is continually in flux.

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.

Business is a means- the only means- to increase the quantity of goods available for preserving life and rendering it more agreeable.

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

A short time ago the demagogues blamed capitalism for the poverty of the masses. Today they rather blame capitalism for the "affluence" that it bestows upon the common man.