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Not mythical material productive forces, but reason and ideas determine the course of human affairs. What is needed to stop the trend toward socialism and despotism is common-sense and moral courage.

Ludwig von Mises

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Ludwig von Mises
Age: 92 †
Born: 1881
Born: September 29
Died: 1973
Died: October 10
Economist
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Lemberg
Austria
Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises
Ludwig Heinrich Mises
Sense
Liberty
Forces
Mythical
Ideas
Economic
Economics
Despotism
Reason
Stop
Determine
Trend
Human
Courses
Material
Trends
Humans
Course
Materials
Affairs
Moral
Toward
Socialism
Common
Courage
Productive
Force
Needed
Affair

More quotes by Ludwig von Mises

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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.
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Anarchism misunderstands the real nature of man. It would be practicable only in a world of angels and saints
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Men are fighting one another because they are convinced that the extermination and liquidation of adversaries is the only means of promoting their own well-being.
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Every specific tax, as well as the nation's whole tax system, becomes self-defeating above a certain height of the rates.
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You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you. If this be arrogance, as some of your critics observed, it is still the truth that had to said in the age of the Welfare State.
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There is no other planning for freedom and general welfare than to let the market system work.
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All this talk: the state should do this or that, ultimately means: the police should force consumers to behave otherwise than they would behave spontaneously.
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Some experts have declared that it is necessary to tax the people until it hurts. I disagree with these sadists.
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A new type of superstition has got hold of people's minds, the worship of the state. People demand the exercise of the methods of coercion and compulsion, of violence and threat. Woe to anybody who does not bend his knee to the fashionable idols!
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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?
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The masses favor socialism because they trust the socialist propaganda of the intellectuals. The intellectuals, not the populace, are molding public opinion.
Ludwig von Mises
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Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them.
Ludwig von Mises
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Only to bureaucrats can the idea occur that establishing new offices, promulgating new decrees, and increasing the number of government employees alone can be described as positive and beneficial measures.
Ludwig von Mises
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Reason is the main resource of man in his struggle for survival.
Ludwig von Mises
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There can be no freedom in art and literature where the government determines who shall create them.
Ludwig von Mises
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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
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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.
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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.
Ludwig von Mises
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As the prosperity of the nation and the height of wage rates depend on a continual increase in the capital invested in its plants, mines and farms, it is one of the foremost tasks of good government to remove all obstacles that hinder the accumulation and investment of new capital.
Ludwig von Mises
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The struggle for freedom is not the struggle of the many against the few, but of minorities, sometimes of a minority of but one man gainst the majority.
Ludwig von Mises