Ludwig von Mises Quotes

It's about food. It's about your home. It's about your life. The government is worried about all of the above. All I'm saying is you should be worried they're worried. Here's why: They're telling you that you can't take care of yourself. You can't be trusted with what you put in your mouth or what you sign on the mortgage dotted line. So they'll tell you what to put in your mouth and they'll save you from what you signed on that dotted line. Does anyone see a trend here? Personal responsibility has now become government responsibility.

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.

I believe you can divide the people in to two basic groups, those who believe government is a necessary good and those who believe it is a necessary evil, those who want government to take care of them, those who want government to leave them alone.

My quarrel is not with the legitimate role of government but with the unlimited role of government.

Government seems to operate on the principle that if even one individual is incapable of using his freedom competently, no one can be allowed to be free.

Government prohibitions do always more mischief than had been calculated; and it is not without much hesitation that a statesman should hazard to regulate the concerns of individuals, as if he could do it better than themselves.

I own that I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.

We don't want a busybody government - a boss - that butts into our lives every chance it gets to tell us how to work, how to play, where to live and on and on.

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

The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents.

And yet even among the friends of liberty, many people are deceived into believing that government can make them safe from all harm, provide fairly distributed economic security, and improve individual moral behavior. If the government is granted a monopoly on the use of force to achieve these goals, history shows that power is always abused. Every single time.

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 a dangerous notion that we need a government to protect us from ourselves.

The problem is big government. If whoever controls government can impose his way upon you, you have to fight constantly to prevent the control from being harmful. With small, limited government, it doesn't much matter who controls it, because it can't do you much harm.

Since when do we let the government decide what is or isn't good for us? What the hell does Congress know about nutrition, anyway?... If the government can use force whenever something is "in our best interest" then government should force everyone to wake up at 6am every morning for calisthenics in the front yard. Fast food establishments should be torn down and replaced with bars that serve carrot juice and alfalfa sprouts, since - "it's in your best interest." This paternalistic attitude that "the government knows best" and that you are merely a helpless child is insulting and reprehensible.

But without a caring society, without each citizen voluntarily accepting the weight of responsibility, government is destined to grow even larger, taking more of your money, burrowing deeper into your lives.

Americans oppose Obamacare because they understand that it is inconsistent with our liberties and our idea of limited government and that it will destroy the best health care system in the world.

We stand up and proudly proclaim that Washington is not our caretaker and we reject a state, in Margaret Thatcher's words, a state that takes too much from us to do too much for us.

We cannot afford to walk down that dangerous path of government overstepping its boundaries into the most personal parts of our lives.

Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.

All government, of course, is against liberty.

People are probably going to realize they can live with a lot less government than what they thought they needed.

I had a lot of friends in high school who said, 'Louie, I don't care what the government does as long as they leave me alone.' Well, guess what, when you don't care what the government does, it does not leave you alone.

I don't want to live in a nanny state where people are telling me where I can go and what I can do.

It's not government's business what people do in their private bedrooms.