Ludwig von Mises Quotes

I have to tell it again and again: I have no doctrine. I only point out something. I point out reality, I point out something in reality which has not or too little been seen. I take him who listens to me at his hand and lead him to the window. I push open the window and point outside. I have no doctrine, I carry on a dialogue.

Probability is expectation founded upon partial knowledge. A perfect acquaintance with all the circumstances affecting the occurrence of an event would change expectation into certainty, and leave nether room nor demand for a theory of probabilities.

Don't confuse facts with reality.

Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not.

When we value correct principles, we have truth - a knowledge of things as they are.

Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence, to love than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.

That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were truths and they were all beautiful.

I often wish... that I could rid the world of the tyranny of facts. What are facts but compromises? A fact merely marks the point where we have agreed to let investigation cease.

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.

Since Plato, we have been considering the nature of knowledge, the meaning of meaning and the status of the physical world.

Time and events bring out the truth, but they also deal a mortal blow.

Knowledge goes hand and hand with truth.

Facts are not the truth. They only indicate where the truth may lie.

It takes as much time and trouble to pull down a falsehood as to build up a truth.

Falsehoods which we spurn to-day Were the truths of long ago.

Facts are often complicated.

Even under the most favorable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its center.

Sometimes a god comes.... He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.

The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.

Books are like truth serum-- if you don't read, you can't figure out what's real.

Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.

What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.

The truth isn't just the facts. You can have all the facts imaginable and miss the truth, just as you can have facts missing or some wrong, and reach the larger truth.

Truth must be told-and things must change! If words are not about real things and do not cause things to happen, what is the good of them?

What transforms this world is - knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed.