Ludwig von Mises Quotes

The individual is prior to society and society must be ordered to the good of the individual.

Instead of boiling up individuals into the species, I would draw a chalk circle round every individuality, and preach to it to keep within that, and preserve and cultivate its identity.

I believe the highest aspiration of man should be individual freedom and the development of the individual.

The hero's will is not that of his ancestors nor of his society, but his own. This will to be oneself is heroism.

We have to bring back the individual. Management has smothered the individual.

Society is just a structure with no soul. The soul is of the individual. One individual outweighs all societies. And, one individual's revolution outweighs all revolutions in the whole of history, because one man can become the womb for God to be reborn.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

For too long in this society, we have celebrated unrestrained individualism over common community.

The individual is not accountable to society for his actions, insofar as these concern the interests of no person but himself.

I have not much faith in "good government." What we need is the development of the individual.

A nation need not be a mob of slaves, clinging to one another through fear, and for the most part incapable of self-government, and begging to be led; but it might consist of vigorous self-reliant men, knit to one another by innumerable ties, into a strong, tense, and elastic organization.

In an over-organized society, the individual is altogether crushed out of existence. He gains the whole wealth of social thought around him and loses his own soul.

Man is not made for society, but society is made for man.

A government must govern, must prescribe and enforce laws within its sphere or cease to be a government. Moreover, the individual must be independent and free within his own sphere or cease to be an individual. The fundamental question ... is now, and always will be through what adjustments, by what actions, these principles may be applied.

We need a strong civil society where the connection between different people and groups is firm and vibrant, not brittle and divided.

I just like showing people - and this might be at the root of everything that I've done - that I don't want to be looked at as a baseball robot.

Now that I'm older, I understand that it's up to the individual to decide who they are or what they are.

The function of the society is to cultivate the individual. It is not the function of the individual to support society.

To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them.

I am not a communist first and an individualist second. I am an individualist first, and I don't mean this in the shallow, purely egotistical sense of self-interest and everyone else be damned. I mean this in the true sense of enlightenment, recovery of personality, and the full development of personality.

To me, each individual is far more valuable than society as a whole.

The goal of Scientology is making the individual capable of living a better life in his own estimation and with his fellows and the playing of a better game.

The State is concentric, but the individual is eccentric.

Society in its full sense . . . is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it.

Nothing is more to me than myself.