Ludwig Von Mises

The state is essentially an apparatus of compulsion and coercion. The characteristic feature of its activities is to compel people through the application or the threat of force to behave otherwise than they would like to behave.

Public works are not accomplished by the miraculous power of a magic wand. They are paid for by funds taken away from the citizens.

The real bosses in the capitalist system of market economy are the consumers. They by their buying and by their abstention from buying decide who should own the capital and run the plants. They determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality. Their attitudes result either in profit or in loss for the enterpriser. They make poor men rich and rich men poor. They are no easy bosses.

Not mythical material productive forces, but reason and ideas determine the course of human affairs. What is needed to stop the trend toward socialism and despotism is common-sense and moral courage.

[E]conomic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics

To the masses, the catchwords of Socialism sound so enticing... so they will continue to work for Socialism, helping thereby to bring about the inevitable decline of the civilization which the nations of the West have taken thousands of years to build up.

Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer.

As the science of economics...exploded the fallacies of every brand of utopianism, it was outlawed and stigmatized as unscientific.

When we call a capitalist society a consumers democracy we mean that the power to dispose of the means of production, which belongs to the entrepreneurs and capitalists, can only be acquired by means of the consumers ballot, held daily in the marketplace.

The program of liberalism if condensed into a single word, would have to read: property, that is, private ownership of the means of production.

Continued adherence to a policy of compulsory education is utterly incompatible with efforts to establish lasting peace.

Only one thing can conquer war-that attitude of mind which can see nothing in war but destruction and annihilation.

A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets.

The philosophy of protectionism is a philosophy of war.

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.

War...is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror.

If men do not now succeed in abolishing war, civilization and mankind are doomed.

Economically considered, war and revolution are always bad business.

For it is an essential difference between capitalist and socialist production that under capitalism men provide for themselves, while under Socialism they are provided for.

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. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.

The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution.