Only to bureaucrats can the idea occur that establishing new offices, promulgating new decrees, and increasing the number of government employees alone can be described as positive and beneficial measures.
Taxing profits is tantamount to taxing success.
The idea that political freedom can be preserved in the absence of economic freedom, and vice versa, is an illusion. Political freedom is the corollary of economic freedom.
German Marxian’s coined the dictum: If socialism is against human nature, then human nature must be changed.
The struggle for freedom is not the struggle of the many against the few, but of minorities, sometimes of a minority of but one man gainst the majority.
As soon as we surrender the principle that the state should not interfere in any questions touching on the individuals mode of life, we end by regulating and restricting the latter down to the smallest details.
Manufacturing and commercial monopolies owe their origin not to a tendency imminent in a capitalist economy but to governmental interventionist policy directed against free trade and laissez faire.
Economics is not about things and tangible material objects; it is about men, their meanings and actions.
Economic knowledge necessarily leads to liberalism.
The characteristic mark of economic history under capitalism is unceasing economic progress, a steady increase in the quantity of capital goods available, and a continuous trend toward an improvement in the general standard of living.
All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts.
The worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men. The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by governments.
The masses, in their capacity as consumers, ultimately determine everybody’s revenues and wealth.
Both force and money are impotent against ideas.
The fundamental law of the market is: the customer is always right.
The entrepreneur profits to the extent he has succeeded in serving the consumers better than other people have done.
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.