Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things. Only economic action has created the wealth around us; labor, not the profession of arms, brings happiness. Peace builds, war destroys. - Ludwig von Mises
The welfare of a people lies not in casting other peoples down but in peaceful collaboration. - Ludwig von Mises
Freedom is indivisible. As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop. - Ludwig von Mises
The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion. - Ludwig von Mises
The desire for an increase of wealth can be satisfied through exchange, which is the only method possible in a capitalist economy, or by violence and petition as in a militarist society, where the strong acquire by force, the weak by petitioning. - Ludwig von Mises
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. - Ludwig von Mises
There is not the slightest analogy between playing games and the conduct of business within a market society. The card player wins money by outsmarting his antagonist. The businessman makes money by supplying customers with goods they want to acquire. - Ludwig von Mises
A new type of superstition has got hold of people's minds, the worship of the state. People demand the exercise of the methods of coercion and compulsion, of violence and threat. Woe to anybody who does not bend his knee to the fashionable idols! - Ludwig von Mises
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. - Ludwig von Mises
A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. - Ludwig von Mises
Romanticism is man's revolt against reason, as well as against the condition under which nature has compelled him to live. - Ludwig von Mises
The central element in the economic problem of money is the objective exchange-value of money, popularly called its purchasing power. - Ludwig von Mises
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. - Ludwig von Mises
It is the consumers who make poor people rich and rich people poor. - Ludwig von Mises
Every socialist is a disguised dictator. - Ludwig von Mises