The biological equipment of a man rigidly restricts the field in which he can serve.
Science does not give us absolute and final certainty. It only gives us assurance within the limits of our mental abilities and the prevailing state of scientific thought.
Against what is stupid, nonsensical, erroneous, and evil, [classical] liberalism fights with the weapons of the mind, and not with brute force and repression.
In a battle between force and an idea, the latter always prevails.
It is the consumers who make poor people rich and rich people poor.
Socialism is an alternative to capitalism as potassium cyanide is an alternative to water.
Repression by brute force is always a confession of the inability to make use of the better weapons of the intellect—better because they alone give promise of final success.
Restrictionistic ideas have never met with any measure of popular sympathy except after a time of monetary depreciation when it has been necessary to decide what should take the place of the abandoned inflationary policy.
The attempt to restrain prices within limits has to be given up. A government that sets out to abolish market prices is inevitably driven towards the abolition of private property.
The agents of etatism have certainly not been lacking in zeal and energy. But, for all this, economic affairs cannot be kept going by magistrates and policemen.
It is not the poverty of individuals and the community, not indebtedness to foreign nations, not the unfavourableness of the conditions of production, that force up the rate of exchange, but inflation.
Inflationism is that monetary policy that seeks to increase the quantity of money.
But when States did debase the coinage, it was always from purely fiscal motives. The government needed financial help, that was all; it was not concerned with questions of currency policy.
Naive inflationism demands an increase in the quantity of money without suspecting that this will diminish the purchasing power of the money.
Inflation made it possible to divert the fury of the people to ‘speculators’ and ‘profiteers’. Thus it proved itself an excellent psychological resource of the destructive and annihilist war policy.
The doctrine of the importance of hoards for stabilizing the objective exchange-value of money has gradually lost its adherents with the passing of time. Nowadays its supporters are few.
Hence, the statement that the cost of living is different in different localities only means that the same individual cannot secure the same degree of satisfaction from the same stock of goods in different places.
The Marxians love of democratic institutions was a stratagem only, a pious fraud for the deception of the masses. Within a socialist community there is no room left for freedom.
What ranks above all else for economic and political reconstruction is a radical change of ideologies. Economic prosperity is not so much a material problem; it is, first of all, an intellectual, spiritual, and moral problem.
Every step which leads from capitalism toward planning is necessarily a step nearer to absolutism and dictatorship.
No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want.
The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution.
The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion.
If any of the socialist chiefs had tried to earn his living by selling hot dogs, he would have learned something about the sovereignty of the consumers.
Romanticism is man’s revolt against reason, as well as against the condition under which nature has compelled him to live.
Freedom is indivisible. As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop.
He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.
The welfare of a people lies not in casting other peoples down but in peaceful collaboration.
The central element in the economic problem of money is the objective exchange-value of money, popularly called its purchasing power.
The exchange-value of money is the anticipated use-value of the things that can be obtained with it.
The first value of money was clearly the value which the goods used as money possessed (thanks to their suitability for satisfying human wants in other ways) at the moment when they were first used as common media of exchange.
The function of money is to facilitate the business of the market by acting as a common medium of exchange.
The elimination of profit, whatever methods may be resorted to for its execution, must transform society into a senseless jumble.
War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.
Many who are self-taught far excel the doctors, masters, and bachelors of the most renowned universities.
The market system is the basis of our civilization. Its only alternative is the Führer principle.
More dangerous than bayonets and cannon are the weapons of the mind.
At eighty-eight how do you feel when getting up in the morning? . . . Amazed!
Only one thing can conquer war – that attitude of mind which can see nothing in war but destruction and annihilation.
The philosophy of protectionism is a philosophy of war.
A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets.
If men do not now succeed in abolishing war, civilization and mankind are doomed.
War… is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror.
If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.
If some peoples pretend that history or geography gives them the right to subjugate other races, nations, or peoples, there can be no peace.
The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.
Whoever wants peace among nations must seek to limit the state and its influence most strictly.
Economically considered, war and revolution are always bad business.
The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments.
Whoever wishes peace among peoples must fight statism.
The attainment of the economic aims of man presupposes peace.
Modern society, based as it is on the division of labor, can be preserved only under conditions of lasting peace.
Society has arisen out of the works of peace the essence of society is peacemaking.