Ludwig von Mises Quotes

Communism is a monopolistic system, economically and politically.

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

Socialism means slavery.

Spend most of the day reading fascisti pamphlets. They certainly have turned the whole country into an army. From cradle to grave one is cast in the mould of fascismo and there can be no escape…. It is certainly a socialist experiment in that it destroys individuality. It also destroys liberty.

There would be but one article in the constitution of a State Socialistic country: “The right of the majority is absolute.”

… creeping collectivism

Appeasement cannot happen again because there is nothing like totalitarianism left to appease.

Collectivism and freedom are mortal enemies. Only one will survive.

Two world wars, three monstrous dictatorships-in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Red China-plus every lesser variant of devastating socialist experimentation in a global spread of brutality and despair, have not prompted modern intellectuals to question or revise their dogma. They still think that it is daring, idealistic and unconventional to denounce the rich. They still believe that money is the root of all evil-except government money, which is the solution to all problems.

The characteristic mark of this age of dictators, wars and revolutions is its anticapitalistic bias. Most governments and political parties were eager to restrict the sphere of private initiative and free enterprise.

There is only one purpose to which a whole society can be directed by a deliberate plan. That purpose is war, and there is no other.

The perfect fascist state needs to operate in conditions of perpetual warfare. Have you ever noticed how the world has been in constant crisis since World War II?

What I experienced in Cuba, I have become a student of what, how communism operates.

We are now moving towards complete collectivism or socialism, a system under which everybody is enslaved to everybody.

During World War II, Joseph Stalin was once asked by an American writer, according to Professor Dean Russell, how he could justify conscripting all the property of all the people for use by the government to fight the war. Stalin answered by asking why they considered it more immoral and illogical to conscript lifeless property than to conscript life itself, as was being done in the United States and all other capitalistic countries. His American challenger had no answer, because there was no answer.

This bill reminds me of the tactics of the former Soviet Union - and we know how successful that was.

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

Socialism starts when government creates a problem, and then government steps in to solve the problem.

To say "I accept" in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration-camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas-masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press-censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murder.

Hitler and Mussolini were only the primary spokesmen for the attitude of domination and craving for power that are in the heart of almost everyone. Until the source is cleared, there will always be confusion and hate, wars and class antagonisms.

It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.

Tyranny is the political corollary of socialism, as representative government is the political corollary of the market economy.

War has all the characteristics of socialism most conservatives hate: Centralized power, state planning, false rationalism, restricted liberties, foolish optimism about intended results, and blindness to unintended secondary results.

There is no difference in principle, ... between the economic philosophy of Nazism, socialism, communism, and fascism and that of the American welfare state and regulated economy.

Churchill knew instinctively what was wrong with communism - that it repressed liberty; that it replaced individual discretion with state control; that it entailed the curtailment of democracy, and therefore that it was tyrannous.