Ludwig von Mises Quotes

The idea is that the state doesn't have rights to limit individuals' wants and passions. I disagree with that.

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.

You have to ask yourself, 'Who owns me? Do I own myself or am I just another piece of government property?'

Even if drugs are fully as destructive as they are usually claimed to be, it is morally wrong and demonstrably more destructive for government to deprive people of their unalienable, individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to make an utter mess of their own lives. Since human beings are inclined to learn more from the mistakes they make, rather than from their triumphs, the right to fail, for individuals and groups alike, may be even more important than the right to succeed, and it must be fiercely protected at almost any cost.

It is no accident that wherever the State ha taken economic decision away from the citizen, it has deprived him of his other liberties as well.

Private lives should be no business of the State. The State is bad enough as it is. It cannot educate or medicate or feed the people; it cannot do anything but kill the people. No State like that do we want prying into our private lives.

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.

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

There is no justification for public interference with purely private concerns.

Every time you pass a law, it is a little bite out of freedom.

In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state. It's become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.

The Libertarian Party holds that same-sex marriages are an individual issue and that the government has no right to determine with whom a person should have a relationship.

The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizen's skin.

I don't like the idea that the government has so much of a say in things.

We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.

Is there anything in the existing condition that makes the duty of Congress to put the liberty of all the people of the United States in jeopardy?... Are we going to take up the question of what a man shall eat and what a man shall drink, and put him under severe penalties if he is eating or drinking something different from what the chemists of the Agricultural Department think desirable?

Prohibition is a deathblow to the liberty of the individual …

Things in which the individual is the person directly interested, never go right but as they are left to his own discretion; and that any regulation of them by authority, except to protect the rights of others, is sure to be mischievous.

My thinking tends to be libertarian. That is, I oppose intrusions of the state into the private realm—as in abortion, sodomy, prostitution, pornography, drug use, or suicide, all of which I would strongly defend as matters of free choice in a representative democracy.

The individual is greater than the state.

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.

… it [liberty] denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint, but also the right of the individual to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home, bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of one's own conscience and generally, to enjoy those privileges long recognized in common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.

I am not about to be a party to anything having to do with the law that is going to destroy individual freedom and liberty in this country.

I know my kids best. I know what morals and values are right for my children. I think we should not have an oppressive state telling us what to do.

It is essential that the young people of this country learn to respect the right of every man and woman to seek his or her happiness with minimal interference from the government.