Capitalism needs neither propaganda nor apostles. Its achievements speak for themselves. Capitalism delivers the goods.
Depressions and mass unemployment are not caused by the free market but by government interference in the economy.
The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty.
It is vain to fight totalitarianism by adopting totalitarian methods. Freedom can only be won by men unconditionally committed to the principles of freedom. The first requisite for a better social order is the return to unrestricted freedom of thought and speech.
The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution.
Freedom is indivisible. As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop.
The root of the evil is not the construction of new, more dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest.
Free markets. What does this system mean? The answer is simple: it is the market economy, it is the system in which the cooperation of individuals in the social division of labor is achieved by the market.
The productivity of social cooperation surpasses in every respect the sum total of the production of isolated individuals.
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.
Whoever wishes peace among peoples must fight statism.
There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.
The boom is called good business, prosperity, and upswing. Its unavoidable aftermath, the readjustment of conditions to the real data of the market, is called crisis, slump, bad business, depression.
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.
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!
Liberty is always freedom from the government.
Some think that they will exercise power for the general good, but that is what all those with power have believed. Power is evil in itself, regardless of who exercises it.
All attempts to coerce the living will of human beings into the service of something they do not want must fail.
Government is essentially the negation of liberty.
Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.