Ludwig von Mises Quotes

One thing bothered me as a student. In the 1960s, human behavior was totally off limits for the biologist. There was animal behavior, then there was a long time nothing, after which came human behavior as a totally separate category best left to a different group of scientists.

Life is beautiful but people are crazy.

Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.

Natural disasters are terrifying - that loss of control, this feeling that something is just going to randomly end your life for absolutely no reason is terrifying. But, what scares me is the human reaction to it and how people behave when the rules of civility and society are obliterated.

Nothing seems at first sight less important than the outward form of human actions, yet there is nothing upon which men set more store: they grow used to everything except to living in a society which has not their own manners.

The Social Sciences will concern themselves with the rationalization of social control... the control of human behavior.

World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual.

That's the world we live in: when it comes to economics, people have emotions; it's not like chemistry or physics.

Sexuality is the great field of battle between biology and society.

The proper study of Mankind is Everything.

I think moral philosophy is speculation on how we ought to live together done by people who have very little clue how people work. So I think most moral philosophy is disconnected from the species that we happen to be. In fact, they like it that way. Many moral philosophers insist that morality grows out of our rationality, that it applies to any rational being anywhere in the universe, and that it is not based on contingent or coincidental facts about our evolution.

Problems of human behavior still continue to baffle us, but at least in the Library we have them properly filed.

I am profoundly skeptical about our abilities to predict the future in general, and human behavior in particular.

There is in the universe something for the description and analysis of which the natural sciences cannot contribute anything. There are events beyond the range of those events that the procedures of the natural sciences are fit to observe and describe. There is human action.

The prime lesson the social sciences can learn from the natural sciences is just this: that it is necessary to press on to find the positive conditions under which desired events take place, and that these can be just as scientifically investigated as can instances of negative correlation. This problem is beyond relativity.

Aggression, like every other part of human behavior we take for granted, is a challenging engineering problem!

Human beings seem to be far more autonomous and self-governed than modern psychological theory allows for.

Anything's possible in Human Nature ...Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy.

We learn nothing from history except the infinite variety of men's behaviour.

[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.

The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.

Do not underestimate the human being, who sometimes appears so simple. Even with sight as sharp as an eagle, a mind as sharp as a razor, senses more powerful than gods, hearing that can catch the music and the lamentations of life, your knowledge of humanity will never be total.

If you don't believe in the innate unreasonableness of human beings, just try raising children.

Tis impossible to judge with much Præcision of the true Motives and Qualities of human Actions, or of the Propriety of Rules contrived to govern them, without considering with like Attention, all the Passions, Appetites, Affections in Nature from which they flow. An intimate Knowledge therefore of the intellectual and moral World is the sole foundation on which a stable structure of Knowledge can be erected.

Earthlings are the great explainers, explaining why this event is structured as it is, telling how other events may be achieved or avoided.