Ludwig von Mises Quotes

People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict.

The shortest and best way to make your fortune is to let people see clearly that it is in their interest to promote yours.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

All human interaction, you can break it down to incentives. All relationships, at some level, are transactional. They're fascinated with incentives.

The best way to get on in the world is to make people believe it's to their advantage to help you.

A society that is all self-interest and no comradeship is not a society at all. But a society that is all comradeship and no self-interest is also not a society; it is a sect - or, on the largest scale, totalitarianism.

I think most people act in their self-interest.

Fundamentally, American society is composed of individuals who don't go out of their way to do each other favours.

I guess because I'm a liberal I think it's not people's natural instinct to be completely self-interested.

It was good for the Japanese. It was good for the Russians, and it was good for me.

Men keep their agreements when it is an advantage to both parties not to break them; and I shall so frame my laws that it will be evident to the Athenians that it will be for their interest to observe them.

Politically, economically and philosophically the motive of self-interest not only is but must...and ought to be the mainspring of human conduct...

Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society, which he has in his view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to the society.

The balance between the cooperative and altruistic tendencies and those which are disoperative and egoistic is relatively close. Under many conditions the cooperative forces lose, In the long run, however, the group centered, more altruistic drives are slightly stronger. ... human altruistic drives are as firmly based on an animal ancestry as is man himself.

Self interest is a masterful agent in modern civilization.

… a good society ensues from the selfish pursuits of individual men.

We act like a zero-sum society, when in reality there is a lot of non zero-sum fat to be skimmed off to everyone's mutual advantage.

If I can positively affect the team, then it also works for myself. That's really my mindset.

You do things for yourself, and you do things for other people, and you hope that these things coincide.

At Manchester, everyone plays for himself and does what he wants but it works out in the end.

What's good for me is certainly not good for other people.

The best way of fulfilling your own interest is to take care of others.

The hazards of the generalized prisoner's dilemma are removed by the match between the right and the good.

The best way to motivate other people to help YOU fulfil your goals is to help them fulfil THEIR goals

Capitalism or market economy is that system of social cooperation and division of labor that is based on private ownership of the means of production.