Ludwig von Mises Quotes

I'm always wary of the lessons of the past. There's a lot of past out there, and you can draw whatever lessons you want.

You can cite a hundred references to show that the biblical God is a bloodthirsty tyrant, but if they can dig up two or three verses that say "God is love" they will claim that you are taking things out of context!

The illusion is that most of my work is simply about past events: a point in history and nothing else.

No work of history can ever escape its own time...we are all influenced by what we read and what we experience.

The Koran is a vast, vague book, filled with poetry and contradictions (much like the Bible). You can find in it condemnations of war and incitements to struggle, beautiful expressions of tolerance and stern strictures against unbelievers. Quotations from it usually tell us more about the person who selected the passages than about Islam.

Most historians are engaged in fiction.

Historians will tell you that they deal with fact and empirical evidence. But that doesn't really help me understand a person.

All biography is the interpretation of events through the prism of another life and the mores of another time.

The biblical authors wrote of God's sovereignty over His world, and of man's experiences within that world, using such modes of speech about the natural order and human experience as were current in their days, and in a language that was common to themselves and their contemporaries. This is saying no more than that they wrote to be understood. Their picture of the world and things in it is not put forward as normative for later science, andy more than their use of Hebrew and Greek is put forward as a perfect model for composition in these languages.

History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.

There is no such thing as an objective interpretation.

That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.

Words mean what they're generally believed to mean. When Charles II saw Christopher Wren's St. Paul's Cathedral for the first time, he called it "awful, pompous, and artificial." Meaning roughly: Awesome, majestic, and ingenious.

We read the past by the light of the present, and the forms vary as the shadows fall, or as the point of vision alters.

It is a mistake to look to the Bible to close a discussion; the Bible seeks to open one.

The Bible itself is a book that constantly must be wrestled with and re-interpreted. ... Bible interpretation is colored by historical context, the reader's bias and current realities. The more you study the Bible, the more questions it raises. It is not possible to simply do what the Bible says.

It's never pleasant to have one's unquestioning beliefs put in their historical context, as I know from experience, I can assure you.

most scientific problems are far better understood by studying their history than their logic.

The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present.

The lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book.

We approach Scripture with minds already formed by the mass of accepted opinions and viewpoints with which we have come into contact, in both the Church and the world....It is easy to be unaware that it has happened; it is hard even to begin to realize how profoundly tradition in this sense has moulded us.

The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer's ideas or personality.

I think everyone does selective reading. Everybody has a filter, and that is real easy for critics to see things from their perspectives, and I'm going, I didn't mean that at all. And believers do the same.

The great thing about history is that it is adaptable.

You can only understand the present age when it is past.