Quotes from The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science

By Ludwig Von Mises (1962)

• Not the state is an evil, but the shortcomings of the human mind and character that imperatively require the operation of a police power. Government and state can never be perfect because they owe their raison d’être to the imperfection of man and can attain their end, the elimination of man’s innate impulse to violence, only by recourse to violence, the very thing they are called upon to prevent.#
  AnarchyPolitics
• This mode of classification [between economic and noneconomic behavior] does not make any sense if we apply it to the behavior of the consumer.#
  Praxeology
• Whether or not [acting man] aims at accumulating wealth, he always aims at employing that he owns for those ends which, as he thinks, will satisfy him best.#
  Praxeology
• The specific goals that people aim at in action are very different and continually change. But all acting is invariably induced by one motive only, viz., to substitute a state that suits the actor better for the state that would prevail in the absence of his action.#
  Praxeology
• Not people with the best eyesight are experts in ophthalmology, but ophthalmologists even if they are myopic.#
  Proverb
• The worst enemy of clear thinking is the propensity to hypostasize, i.e., to ascribe substance or real existence to mental constructs or concepts.#
• In denying perseity, i.e., independent existence of their own, to the collectives, one does not in the least deny the reality of the effects brought about by the cooperation of individuals. One merely establishes the fact that the collectives come into being by the thoughts and actions of individuals and that they disappear when the individuals adopt a different way of thinking and acting.#
• The first thing that has to be established in speaking of a social entity is the clear definition of what logically justifies counting or not counting an individual as a member of this group.#
• All men are liable to error and . . . it could happen that the majority, deluded by faulty doctrines propagated by irresponsible demagogues, could embark on policies that would result in disaster, even in the entire destruction of civilization. But . . . no thinkable method of government could prevent such a catastrophe.#
  DemocracyPolitics
• Historical experience is not laboratory experience. It is experience of complex phenomena, of the outcome of the joint operation of various forces.#
  EpistemologyHistory
• The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical.#
  Politics
• No system of social cooperation can remove the dilemma between a man’s or a group’s interests in the short run and those in the long run.#
  Politics
• No reform can render perfectly satisfactory the operation of an institution the essential activity of which consists in inflicting pain.#
  Politics
• What the individual forgoes in order to cooperate with other individuals is not his personal interests opposed to that of the phantom society. He forsakes an immediate boon in order to reap at a later date a greater boon.#
  Politics
• The Christian doctrine according to which God creates the soul of every individual cannot be refuted by discursive reasoning as it cannot be proved in this way.#
  EpistemologyReligion
• The human mind in its search for knowledge resorts to philosophy or theology precisely because it aims at an explanation of problems that the natural sciences cannot answer.#
  EpistemologyReligion
• No technological and therapeutical improvements can be practically utilized if the material means for its utilization have not been previously made available by saving and capital accumulation.#
  Economics
• In a universe lacking [regularity] there could not be any thinking and nothing could be experienced. For experience is the awareness of identity in what is perceived; it is the first step toward a classification of events. And the concept of classes would be empty and useless if there were no regularity.#Quoted in George Selgin, Praxeology and Understanding (1990)
  Epistemology
• Logic can neither prove nor disprove the core of theological doctrines. All that science – apart from history – can do in this regard is to expose the fallacies of magic and fetishistic superstitions and practices.#
  ScienceReligion
• It may even be doubted whether it is possible to separate the analysis of the epistemological problem from the treatment of the substantive issues of the science concerned. The basic contributions to the modern epistemology of the natural sciences were an accomplishment of Galilei, not of Bacon; of Newton and Lavoisier, not of Kant and Comte. What is tenable in the doctrines of logical positivism is to be found in the works of the great physicists of the last hundred years, not in the “Encyclopedia of Unified Science.”#
  EpistemologyScience
• If there were nothing permanent in the manifestations of the human mind, there could not be any theory of knowledge, but merely a historical account of the various attempts made by men to acquire knowledge.#
  Epistemology
• Political science merely records what has been done or has been suggested in its field in the past, but is at a loss to tell anything about invariant relations among the elements with which it deals.#
  Methodology
• [The] truth or validity [of the a priori categories] cannot be proved or refuted as can those of a posteriori propositions, because they are precisely the instrument that enables us to distinguish what is true or valid from what is not.#
  Epistemology
• If there were no regularity, nothing could be learned from experience. In proclaiming experience as the main instrument of acquiring knowledge, empiricism implicitly acknowledges the principles of regularity and causality.#
  ScienceEpistemology
• There is no way to eliminate from an analysis of the universe any reference to the mind. Those who try it merely substitute a phantom of their own invention for reality.#
  EpistemologyScience
• Any doctrine that teaches that some “real” or “external” forces write their own story on the human mind and thus tries to reduce the human mind into an apparatus that transforms “reality” into ideas in the way in which the digestive organs assimilate food is at a loss to distinguish between what is true and what is not.#
  Epistemology
• Knowledge is a tool of action. Its function is to advise man how to proceed in his endeavors to remove uneasiness.#
  Praxeology
• The viciousness of positivism is not to be seen in the adoption of this principle [of “not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant”], but in the fact that it does not acknowledge any other ways of proving a proposition than those practiced by the experimental natural sciences and qualifies as metaphysical – which, in the positivist jargon, is synonymous with nonsensical – all other methods of rational discourse.#
  ScienceEpistemology
• The failure of the attempts to apply the methods and the epistemological principles of the natural sciences to the problems of human action is caused by the fact that these sciences have no tool to deal with valuing. In the sphere of the phenomena they study there is no room for purposive behavior.#
  EpistemologyScience
• If one eliminates any reference to judgements of value, it is impossible to say anything about the actions of man, i.e., about all the behavior that is not merely the consummation of physiological processes taking place in the human body.#
  EpistemologyPraxeology
• What distinguishes the descriptions of history from those of the natural sciences is that they are not interpreted in the light of the category of regularity.#
  ScienceHistoryEpistemology
• The positivist doctrine that denies the legitimacy of any metaphysical doctrine is no less metaphysical than many other doctrines at variance with it.#
  ScienceEpistemology
• Statistics provides numerical information about historical facts, that is, about events that happened at a definite period of time to definite people in a definite area. It deals with the past and not with the future. Like any other past experience, it can occasionally render important services in planning for the future, but it does not say anything that is directly valid for the future.#
• Man has the power to suppress instinctive desires, he has a will of his own, he chooses between incompatible ends. In this sense he is a moral person; in this sense he is free. However, it is not permissible to interpret this freedom as independence of the universe and its laws.#
  Free Will
• Freedom of the will does not mean that the decisions that guide a man’s action fall, as it were, from outside into the fabric of the universe and add to it something that had no relation to and was independent of the elements which had formed the universe before.#
  Free Will
• There is no reason to ascribe to the operation the mind performs in the act of becoming aware of an external object a higher epistemological dignity than to the operation the mind performs in describing its own ways of procedure.#
  EpistemologyScience