Ludwig von Mises Quotes

People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.

An idea is, in the end, always stronger than circumstances.

There's no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill. There's only an idea. Ideas are bulletproof.

Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.

What can change the world today is the same thing that has changed it in the past-an idea and the service of dedicated, committed individuals to that idea.

Abstracts are real and time is a lie, it cannot be measured when one moment can expand to hold everything.

What rules the world is idea, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.

Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.

Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract

...That which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things.

Nobody has ever seen an electron. Nor a thought. You can't see a thought, you can't measure, weigh, nor taste it- but thoughts are the most real things in the Galaxy.

The way real memories work, from what we understand, is really complex. And it's an interconnection of different things and redundancy in the brain. So the idea of a memory existing as a little snow globe - the way we represent it in the film - is actually not scientifically accurate at all.

Where ideas are real and reality is shadow.

Ideas are very important to the shaping of society. In fact, they are more powerful than bombings or armies or guns. And this is because ideas are capable of spreading without limit. They are behind all the choices we make. They can transform the world in a way that governments and armies cannot. Fighting for liberty with ideas makes more sense to me than fighting with guns or politics or political power. With ideas, we can make real change that lasts.

It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve.

The idea of abstract power only exists for academics, not in real life.

An abstraction will move a mountain: Nothing can withstand an idea.

Ideas are intangible forces, but they have more power than the physical brains that give birth to them. They have the power to live on, after the brain that creates them has returned to dust.

It is only liquid currents of thought that move men and the world

Mental fire is what won't burn real sticks; mental water is what won't necessarily (though of course it may) put out even a mentalfire.

[D]oes the real world have any more substance than visions and hallucinations when we're having them? At any given moment, what's happening in our minds is all and everything that happens.

Both force and money are impotent against ideas.

The power of thought, of idea, is incommensurable, is immeasurable. The world is dominated by thought.

What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are "coins" for real things.

People forget ideas; they don't forget the real presence.