Ludwig von Mises
Economically considered, war and revolution are always bad business.Collection: Finance
To defeat the aggressors is not enough to make peace durable. The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war.Collection: Peace
Only one thing can conquer war - that attitude of mind which can see nothing in war but destruction and annihilation.Collection: Attitude
Whoever wants peace among nations must seek to limit the state and its influence most strictly.Collection: Peace
The attainment of the economic aims of man presupposes peace.Collection: Peace
Whoever wishes peace among peoples must fight statism.Collection: Peace
The philosophy of protectionism is a philosophy of war.Collection: War
A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets.Collection: War
War... is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror.Collection: War
If men do not now succeed in abolishing war, civilization and mankind are doomed.Collection: War
Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking.Collection: Society
If some peoples pretend that history or geography gives them the right to subjugate other races, nations, or peoples, there can be no peace.Collection: History
Peace and not war is the father of all things.Collection: Peace
The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments.Collection: Government
If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.
The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.
Manufacturing and commercial monopolies owe their origin not to a tendency imminent in a capitalist economy but to governmental interventionist policy directed against free trade and laissez faire.
Human civilization is not something achieved against nature; it is rather the outcome of the working of the innate qualities of man.
Sovereignty must not be used for inflicting harm on anyone, whether citizen or foreigner.
War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.
Modern society, based as it is on the division of labor, can be preserved only under conditions of lasting peace.
The root of the evil is not the construction of new, more dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest.
Wars of aggression are popular nowadays with those nations convinced that only victory and conquest could improve their material well-being.
Innovation is the whim of an elite before it becomes a need of the public.
Men are fighting... because they are convinced that the extermination of adversaries is the only means of promoting their own well-being.
War can really cause no economic boom, at least not directly, since an increase in wealth never does result from destruction of goods.
The most important thing to remember is that inflation is not an act of God, that inflation is not a catastrophe of the elements or a disease that comes like the plague. Inflation is a policy.Collection: Important
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.Collection: Men
Liberty is meaningless if it is only the liberty to agree with those in power.Collection: Liberty
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.Collection: Order
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Mean
Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them.Collection: School
Every socialist is a disguised dictator.Collection: Dictator
Government is the only institution that can take a valuable commodity like paper, and make it worthless by applying ink.Collection: Government
The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion.Collection: Struggle
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.Collection: Mean
The truth is that most people lack the intellectual ability and courage to resist a popular movement, however pernicious and ill-considered.Collection: Life
Government spending cannot create additional jobs. If the government provides the funds required by taxing the citizens or by borrowing from the public, it abolishes on the one hand as many jobs as it creates on the other.Collection: Jobs
He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.Collection: Citizens
Every government intervention [in the marketplace] creates unintended consequences, which lead to calls for further government interventions.Collection: Government
Liberty is always freedom from the government.Collection: Government
Continued inflation inevitably leads to catastrophe.Collection: Inflation
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.Collection: Limits
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.Collection: Men
Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.Collection: Peace
The criterion of truth is that it works even if nobody is prepared to acknowledge it.Collection: Truth
All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts.Collection: Thinking
Whoever prefers life to death, happiness to suffering, well-being to misery must defend without compromise private ownership in the means of production.Collection: Mean
Capitalism gave the world what it needed, a higher standard of living for a steadily increasing number of people.Collection: Numbers