Ludwig von Mises Quotes

Advocating the expansion of the powers of the state is treason to mankind

The Left have always preferred the state to the family.

As soon as we surrender the principle that the state should not interfere in any questions touching on the individuals mode of life, we end by regulating and restricting the latter down to the smallest details.

The state has no place in the nation's bedrooms.

In a market economy, however, the individual has some possibility of escaping from the power of the state.

We have to recognize that the freedom of the individual has to be protected not only from the power of the state, but even more so from economic and societal power.

The Left regards the Constitution as defective and outmoded - in part because it impedes the government's ability to control institutions, like churches and families, which stand between the state and individuals.

The history of government is the history of two conflicting principles: one is the supreme importance of the State; the other is the supreme importance of the individual.

Why should I nationalize the industry. I shall nationalize the people.

No nation can be free unless it is strong enough and active enough to control, whenever necessary, every private individual or group whose action affects the general welfare

The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble, through the rivalry of schools and creeds that are anxious to obtain official recognition, and there is great danger that our people will lose our independence of thought and action which is the cause of much of our greatness, and sink into the helplessness of the Frenchman or German who expects his government to feed him when hungry, clothe him when naked, to prescribe when his child may be born and when he may die, and, in fine, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to paradise.

In the East [Russia] the state was everything. Civil society was primordial and gelatinous. In the West there was a proper relationship between the state and civil society.

If the federal government can mandate what we have to spend our own money on, then the federal government can make us buy something even if we are morally opposed to paying for it.

I urge you to examine in your own mind the assumptions which must lay behind using the police power to insist that once-sovereign spirits have no choice but to submit to being schooled by strangers.

This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State, that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long run sustains, nourishes, and impels human destinies.

Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state's monopoly of armed violence.

A little government involvement is just as dangerous as a lot - because the first leads inevitably to the second.

Socialists cry “Power to the people”, and raise the clenched fist as they say it. We all know what they really mean - power over people, power to the State.

The left don't get what they want without the government forcing people to do it is the bottom line.

The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good - anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers'. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business.

The power of the State must be invoked for restoring economic freedom just as it has been invoked for destroying economic freedom.

[Libertarianism] is about curbing state power to let people be and do what they want. Liberalism is about using state power to make people do and be what liberals want. And that makes all the difference in the world.

Whoever says State necessarily says domination, and, consequently, slavery; a State without slavery, open or concealed, is inconceivable: that is why we are enemies of the State.

Reining in the regulatory state would have a massive impact on economic freedom going forward.

A modern liberal is someone who doesn't care what you do, as long as it's compulsory.