Quote

What impels every man to the utmost exertion in the service of his fellow man. Is, in the market not compulsion on the part of gendarmes, hangmen and penal courts, it is self interest.

Ludwig von Mises

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Part
Courts
Self
Compulsion
Every
Fellow
Men
Fellows
Impels
Market
Penal
Service
Hangman
Court
Exertion
Interest
Utmost

More quotes by Ludwig von Mises

Image
What economic calculation requires is a monetary system whose functioning is not sabotaged by government interference.
Ludwig von Mises
Image
It is not enough for [the investor] to know all the factors that can possibly contribute to the determination of a future event. In order to anticipate correctly they must also anticipate correctly the quantity as it were of each factor's contribution and the instant at which its contribution will become effective.
Ludwig von Mises
Image
Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments.
Ludwig von Mises
Image
Big business always serve - directly or indirectly - the masses.
Ludwig von Mises
Image
Socialism in Russia has not brought about an improvement in the conditions of the average man which can be compared with the improvement of conditions, during the same period, in the United States.
Ludwig von Mises
Image
During the 2300 years since Plato, very little opposition has been registered to his ideas.
Ludwig von Mises
Image
Economic knowledge necessarily leads to liberalism
Ludwig von Mises
Image
The democracy of the market consists in the fact that people themselves make their choices and that no dictator has the power to force them to submit to his value judgments.
Ludwig von Mises
Image
One has to recognize that science is not metaphysics, and certainly not mysticism it can never bring us the illumination and the satisfaction experienced by one enraptured in ecstasy. Science is sobriety and clarity of conception, not intoxicated vision.
Ludwig von Mises
Image
Every government intervention [in the marketplace] creates unintended consequences, which lead to calls for further government interventions.
Ludwig von Mises
Image
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
Image
Government and state can never be perfect because they owe their raison d'être to the imperfection of man and can attain their end, the elimination of man's innate impulse to violence, only by recourse to violence, the very thing they are called upon to prevent.
Ludwig von Mises
Image
Only stilted pedants can conceive the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful and what is not. They try to derive from the works of the past a code of rules with which, as they fancy, the writers and artists of the future should comply. But the genius does not cooperate with the pundit.
Ludwig von Mises
Image
All those evils which the [liberals] interpret as evidence of the failure of capitalism, are the necessary outcome of interference with the market.
Ludwig von Mises
Image
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
Image
It is always the individual who thinks. Society does not think any more than it eats or drinks. The evolution of human reasoning from the naive thinking of primitive man to the more subtle thinking of modern science took place within society. However, thinking itself is always an achievement of individuals.
Ludwig von Mises
Image
Is still fulfilling its social function in supplying the consumers with more, better and cheaper goods.
Ludwig von Mises
Image
There is simply no other choice than this: either to abstain from interference in the free play of the market, or to delegate the entire management of production and distribution to the government. Either capitalism or socialism: there exists no middle way.
Ludwig von Mises
Image
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
Image
The philosophy of protectionism is a philosophy of war. The wars of our age are not at variance with popular economic doctrines they are, on the contrary, the inescapable result of a consistent application of these doctrines.
Ludwig von Mises