In a battle between force and an idea, the latter always prevails.
Freedom really means the freedom to make mistakes.
The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion.
The whole of mankind’s progress has had to be achieved against the resistance and opposition of the state and its power of coercion.
The planner is a potential dictator who wants to deprive all other people of the power to plan and act according to their own plans. He aims at one thing only: the exclusive absolute preeminence of his own plan.
Every step toward the elimination of profit is progress on the way toward social disintegration.
People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests.
To assign to everybody his proper place in society is the task of the consumers. Their buying and abstention from buying is instrumental in determining each individual’s social position.
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.
Whoever wants peace among nations must seek to limit the state and its influence most strictly.
The main achievement of economics is that it has provided a theory of peaceful human cooperation. This is why the harbingers of violent conflict have branded it as a dismal science and why this age of wars, civil wars, and destruction has no use for it.
Government is the only institution that can take a valuable commodity like paper, and make it worthless by applying ink.
In a game there are winners and losers. But a business deal is always advantageous for both parties. If both the buyer and the seller were not to consider the transaction as the most advantageous action they could choose under the prevailing conditions, they would not enter into the deal.
All this talk: the state should do this or that, ultimately means: the police should force consumers to behave otherwise than they would behave spontaneously.
The common man is the sovereign consumer whose buying or abstention from buying ultimately determines what should be produced and in what quantity and quality.
The flowering of human society depends on two factors: the intellectual power of outstanding men to conceive sound social and economic theories, and the ability of these or other men to make these ideologies palatable to the majority.
Human action is purposeful behavior.
The philosophy underlying the system of progressive taxation is that the income and wealth of the well-to-do classes can be freely tapped. What the advocates of these tax rates fail to realize is that the greater part of the incomes taxed away would not have been consumed but saved and invested.
What generates war is the economic philosophy of nationalism: embargoes, trade and foreign exchange controls, monetary devaluation, etc. The philosophy of protectionism is a philosophy of war.
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.